Issue 15 February 2019
Issue 12 May 2018
Issue 10 November 2017
Issue 7 February 2017
Issue 5 August 2016
Issue 4 May 2016
Issue 3 February 2016
Issue 2 November 2015
Issue 1 August 2015
7811 Gallery
Anat Ebgi (Wilshire)
Arcana Books
Artbook @ Hauser & Wirth
as-is.la
Babst Gallery
Baert Gallery
Bel Ami
Billis Williams Gallery
Canary Test
Central Server Works Press
Charlie James Gallery
Château Shatto
Cirrus Gallery
Clay ca
Commonwealth & Council
Craft Contemporary
D2 Art (Westwood)
David Kordansky Gallery
David Zwirner
Diane Rosenstein
dublab
Ebony Repertory Theatre at The Nate Holden Performing Arts Center
Fernberger
FOYER-LA
Francis Gallery
François Ghebaly
Gana Art Los Angeles
Giovanni's Room
Hannah Hoffman Gallery
Harkawik
Harper's Gallery
Heavy Manners Library
Helen J Gallery
Human Resources
ICA LA
JOAN
Jurassic Magic Mid-City
Jurassic Magic MacArthur Park
Karma
l.a.Eyeworks
LACA
Lisson Gallery
Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery
Louis Stern Fine Arts
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles
M+B
MAK Center for Art and Architecture
Make Room
Matter Studio Gallery
Megan Mulrooney
Michael Werner Gallery
MOCA Grand Avenue
Monte Vista Projects
Morán Morán
Moskowitz Bayse
Murmurs
Nazarian / Curcio
Night Gallery
NOON Projects
O-Town House
OCHI
Official Welcome
One Trick Pony
Pace
Paradise Framing
Perrotin Los Angeles
Patricia Sweetow Gallery
Rajiv Menon Contemporary
REDCAT (Roy and Edna Disney CalArts Theater)
Regen Projects
Reparations Club
Roberts Projects
Royale Projects
Sea View
Sebastian Gladstone
Smart Objects
SOLDES
SPRÜTH MAGERS
Steve Turner
St. Elmo Village
The Box
The Fulcrum
The Hole
The Journal Gallery
The Landing
The Poetic Research Bureau
The Wende Museum
Thinkspace Projects
Tierra del Sol Gallery
Tiger Strikes Astroid
Timothy Hawkinson Gallery
Track 16
Tyler Park Presents
USC Fisher Museum of Art
Village Well Books & Coffee
Webber
Wönzimer
Ysasi Gallery
Gattopardo
GGLA
John Doe Gallery
Junior High
la BEAST gallery
Marta
Nicodim Gallery
North Loop West
OXY ARTS
Parrasch Heijnen Gallery
Philip Martin Gallery
Rusha & Co.
South Gate Museum and Art Gallery
Staklena Kuća
The Armory Center for the Arts
The Pit Los Angeles
Umico Printing and Framing
Vielmetter Los Angeles
Vincent Price Art Museum
Wilding Cran Gallery
D2 Art (Inglewood)
Experimentally Structured Museum of Art
Long Beach City College
The Den
Torrance Art Museum
Bortolami Gallery (New York, NY)
Bread & Salt (San Diego, CA)
Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art (Buffalo, NY)
Chess Club (Portland, OR)
DOCUMENT (Chicago, IL)
Et al. (San Francisco, CA)
Fresno City College (Fresno, CA)
High Desert Test Sites
ICA San Diego
Left Field (Los Osos, CA)
Level of Service Not Required (La Jolla, CA)
Los Angeles Valley College (Valley Glen, CA)
OCHI (Ketchum, ID)
Baltimore Museum of Art (Baltimore, MD)
Bard College, CCS Library (Annandale-on-Hudson, NY)
Charlotte Street Foundation (Kansas City, MO)
Cranbrook Academy of Art (Bloomfield Hills, MI)
Getty Research Institute (Los Angeles, CA)
Los Angeles Contemporary Archive (Los Angeles, CA)
Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Los Angeles, CA)
Maryland Institute College of Art (Baltimore, MD)
Midway Contemporary Art (Minneapolis, MN)
Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles, CA)
Pepperdine University (Malibu, CA)
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (San Francisco, CA)
School of the Art Institute of Chicago (Chicago, IL)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, NY)
University of California Irvine, Langston IMCA (Irvine, CA)
University of Minnesota Duluth, Tweed Museum of Art (Deluth, MN)
University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, PA)
University of Washington (Seattle, WA)
Walker Art Center (Minneapolis, MN)
Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, NY)
Yale University Library (New Haven, CT)
Our advertising program is essential to the ecology of our publication. Ad fees go directly to paying writers, which we do according to W.A.G.E. standards.
We are currently printing runs of 6,000 every three months. Our publication is distributed locally through galleries and art related businesses, providing a direct outlet to reaching a specific demographic with art related interests and concerns.
To advertise or for more information on rates, deadlines, and production specifications, please contact us at ads@contemporaryartreview.la
-
AA LA
- Ace Hotel
- Alter Space
- Angels Gate Cultural Center
- AWHRHWAR
- BBQ LA
- Ben Sanders
- Big Pictures
- Blum & Poe
- Bullseye Projects
- Bridge Projects
- Central Park
- Chimento Contemporary
- Cranbrook Academy of Art
- Dalton Warehouse
- DXIX
- Elevator Mondays
- Five Car Garage
- Frieze
- Frieze Art Fair
- Garden
- Gas
- Graphite Journal
- Hammer Museum
- Hauser & Wirth
- Hesse Press
- Hunter Shaw Fine Art
- Ibid
- ICA LA
- in lieu
- John Pots
- Karma International
- Kayne Griffin Corcoran
- Klowden Mann
- LA Louver
- LA Valley College
-
Left Field
- Lowell Ryan Projects
- LSH CoLAB
- Luis De Jesus
- Material Art Fair
- Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
- NADA NY
- Night Gallery
- Odd Ark LA
- Ochi Projects
- Oof Books
- NowShop
- Noysky
- Parker Gallery
- Parrasch Heijnen
- Paris LA
- Photo L.A.
- Pomona College Museum of Art
- Praz-Delavallade
- Roberts Projects
- Shulamit Nazarian
- Sprüth Magers
- Syracuse University Art Department
- Telluride Gallery
- The BOX
- The Broad
- The Getty
- The Landing
- The Lodge
- The Pit
- The Underground Museum
- Ulises
- Untitled Art Fair
- Walters & Skyler LLP
- Wilding Cran Gallery
- YBCA
- Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
- X-Tra
Lita Albuquerque, Sol Star (installation view) (1996). Giza Plateau, Egypt. Ninety-nine ultramarine blue pigment circles. Image courtesy of the artist. Photo: Tarek Naga.
In a small, untitled charcoal drawing from 1978, Lita Albuquerque envisions a hallucinatory desert landscape: A solitary mountain emerges from the horizon of an arid plain, bisected by a looming corridor of ultramarine pigment. This band of blue—in the drawing’s perspective, an elongated, receding triangle—stretches from the foreground to the peak’s base, where it greets another ultramarine triangle, this one a geometric portal into the organic body of the mountain. The composition depicts one of the artist’s speculative, unrealized earth-works, labeled as such in handwritten notations that contextualize the pigment interventions: “carve it out of the mountain / dig a trench in the ground”…haptic instructions incite an active engagement with the earth and recall actualized works such as The Washington Monument Project: The Red Pyramid (1980) and Malibu Line (1978/2024), which featured geometric land carvings filled with pigment. Yet the drawing also summons a more uncanny scene. The mountain might recall a nebulous UFO with a triangular aperture, the trough of pigment masquerading as an emanating beam of light. Here, the image’s twin connotations—geological form and celestial anomaly—point to the negative space between land and sky, illuminating the friction between embodied material reality and esoteric belief. Albuquerque’s work frequently inhabits this tension.
Albuquerque shared this drawing with me on a blustery afternoon in April in the Mojave Desert near Joshua Tree, where she was completing a month-long residency at High Desert Test Sites, situated at A–Z West, an 80-acre compound that includes artist Andrea Zittel’s former house and studio. We were standing in a sun-drenched workspace in Zittel’s original, meticulously designed home, nestled among rambling boulder piles at the edge of the wilderness. Albuquerque was residing there with the artist Marc Breslin, her close collaborator, and was in the nascent stages of developing a new site-specific earthwork spread across two locations, one on the property behind the house, and another on a shrubby swath of land in Wonder Valley, a wild and desolate site 40 miles to the east. The finished piece will be revealed in November 2026, a few weeks after the opening of her solo exhibition at the Palm Springs Art Museum, which will include a site-specific rendition of Spine of the Earth (1980), her first-ever Mojave earthwork. We began our visit together in the same manner that she began all of her days there: by descending into a recessed rectangular seating area built into the ground outside, an elegant construction of Zittel’s original design that placed our sightline at earth level, cocooning us into the ground. A hummingbird flitted to the blood-red ocotillo blooms nearby as we gazed towards the mushrooming clouds on the horizon. “Each moment is different here,” she remarked, an observation that attends to life in general but is particularly resonant in the desert, where swift elemental changes—violent bursts of sunlight, sudden whirlwinds—can rewrite conditions in an instant.
Albuquerque, a luminary of the California Light and Space movement who rose to prominence in the 1970s, is known for paintings, sculptures, performances, videos, and earthworks that utilize light and pigment to map the interrelationship between humans and cosmos. She is particularly attuned to her surroundings and remains remarkably vigorous at 80 years old, beginning her workday with a series of meditative exercises that include automatic writing, drawing, more writing, calisthenics, and when she’s near the coast, an ocean swim—activities that merge somatic and linguistic output, hinting at the abiding concerns that run through her six-decade oeuvre. In a morning drawing session at the residency, she produced sketches of the surrounding landscape that echoed her earlier image of the mountain-turned-UFO. In one, an electric blue pathway reaches toward a craggy peak pierced by a triangle; in another, ultramarine orbs buoy above the terrain. On the paper she had written “the expulsion of light into matter,” a poetic proposition tethering tangible and intangible things, hinting at her use of language to uncork the ineffable.
Two months earlier in her downtown Los Angeles studio, Albuquerque read to me from her personal trove of unpublished writing, which, in addition to automatism, includes poetic incantations, prose experiments, and cryptic missives from dreams. She often conceives of characters who presage her own performances—“She had scratched into the earth furiously,”1 for example—allowing her to imagine and later enact her own proprioceptive grammar. The words she shared were selections from her digitized writings that had survived the 2018 Woolsey Fire, the inferno that consumed her longtime Malibu home and studio. At the Palm Springs Art Museum, she will for the first time include several charred relics recovered from the conflagration—an elegiac embrace of the cinder as a symbol of death and rebirth and a solemn nod to the natural world’s volatility.
Back at High Desert Test Sites, I asked about the orbs, and Albuquerque led me outside. We followed a sandy footpath through the property, contending with a curtain of wind that overpowered our voices. It led us to a small wash at the base of spheroidal boulder piles, relics of erosion and ancient magmatic forces. She pointed to a distant peak and remarked that it would be the perfect site for the pigmented triangle she first envisioned in her drawing. Nearby, glowing orbs of powdery ultramarine pigment dotted the clearing, each one a material and topographical experiment packed flush into the earth and then left to the elements. This specific hue is a hallmark of Albuquerque’s work that has appeared in paintings, drawings, sculptures, and earthworks as far afield as Antarctica (Stellar Axis: Antarctica, 2006); Egypt (Sol Star, 1996); Switzerland (Transparent Earth, 2018); and Saudi Arabia (NAJMA: She Placed One Thousand Suns Over The Transparent Overlays of Space, 2020). The ultramarine registers, as she explained over the wind, as a primal memory in the body, stirring something inexplicable and deeply felt. Albuquerque told me she often “mines the body” for these latent forms of knowledge, an archeological sentiment that connects the matter of the body to that of the land itself, proposing each as a source of interred information.
Each circle of highly dense, tightly packed pigment appeared to be a portal into the earth, its circumference just large enough for my body to slip through. The first one we investigated rested below an alcove of stones; its surface had fractured into a matrix of fissures reminiscent of the branching fault lines beneath our feet. Albuquerque seemed satisfied with its quiet metamorphosis. The elements had displaced a thin dusting of pigment onto the surrounding sand, creating a spectral illusion that illuminated the indexical marks of the desert floor. The other portals, intermittently scattered about the landscape, remained shockingly unperturbed by the wind. For their placement, she drew inspiration from the surrounding creosote bushes, which, due to a biochemical process called allelopathy, grow in evenly spaced geometric intervals. Over time, these fragrant plants form clonal rings, dying and resprouting from the root crown in genetically identical circles, making them some of the oldest living organisms on the planet—kindred terrestrial companions for the artist’s uncanny blue spheres. Like the creosote’s buried lattice of roots, Albuquerque imagined her ultramarine portals tunneling into the earth with “centrifugal force,” converging deep beneath the lithosphere. Together we observed echoes of this imagery in the plethora of surrounding anthills, which formed mounds of concentric circles in the sand.
Lita Albuquerque, Untitled (1978). Oil stick and charcoal on paper, 22 × 30 inches. Image courtesy of the artist. Photo: Lita Albuquerque.
Lita Albuquerque at High Desert Test Sites (2026). Image courtesy of the artist. Photo: Marc Breslin.
Lita Albuquerque, Spine of the Earth (installation view) (1980). El Mirage Dry Lake, Mojave Desert, California. Pigment, 600 feet in diameter. Image courtesy of the artist. Photo: Lita Albuquerque.
We spoke about planetary energy, cosmic attunement, plant drawings—lines left in the sand by flora billowing in the wind (forms of terrestrial language)—and the enigmatic wisdom of stones. When Albuquerque began her career, these esoteric topics were anathema to serious art world discourse. Later that evening, she reflected on her early days as a faculty member at ArtCenter College of Design, where she taught for 35 years, noting that she initially felt out of place amid a boys’ club of peers who hierarchized semiotic theory over spiritualism. Still, over time she developed a rapport with her colleagues and eventually found her ground there. Now, the art world’s recent institutional embrace of spiritual and hermetic practices (alongside the canonization of artists such as Hilma af Klint) has only sharpened the prescience of her somatic mysticism.
Approaching sunset, we ventured east to Wonder Valley to visit the site of Albuquerque’s companion earthwork, which at the time consisted of a similar dispersion of ultramarine spheres. A vast, sparsely populated desert basin that abuts the mountainous Sheephole Valley Wilderness, Wonder Valley occupies a geographic transition zone that renders its topography distinct from the more arborous Joshua Tree. Our destination, a rugged tract of land enveloped by two saw-toothed mountain ranges, posed a particular set of challenges. First, Albuquerque had never developed an earthwork on a site that lacked what she referred to as “a vista,” meaning that we could not view the entire installation from any given vantage point. Before this residency, she had also never embedded her pigment spheres into the ground, a gesture that minimizes the discreet margin between the work and its site. Peppered with creosote that had catapulted in height since her first visit in November 2025, the undulating terrain was bifurcated by a sandy wash, its loamy surface sometimes caving beneath our feet. Unlike her previous Mojave earthwork, Spine of the Earth, a fugitive pigment drawing on a dry lakebed, the variable topography here did not yield a smooth canvas.
Each ultramarine circle had adapted to its environs differently; together, they suggested a constellation of emergent ecosystems—one had been newly infiltrated by an army of ants that circumambulated its edge. While I found this enthralling, the artist seemed dismayed. “This has never happened before,” she remarked, and I quickly understood the delicate precarity of collaborating with the terrain. In other areas, she observed that the unrelenting sunlight had subtly blunted the pigment’s chromatic intensity, a conundrum that will likely dictate the bounds of the work’s fleeting existence. Even ephemerality isn’t exempt from subjective criteria—a narrow window of symbiosis exists between marking the landscape and being consumed by it. She had much to consider.
Lita Albuquerque installing Stellar Axis: Antarctica (2006). Image courtesy of the artist. Photo: Jean de Pomereu.
Lita Albuquerque, Sol Star (installation view) (1996). Giza Plateau, Egypt. Ninety-nine ultramarine blue pigment circles. Image courtesy of the artist. Photo: Tarek Naga.
Lita Albuquerque, Cosmic Levitation (2026). Monotype from a steel matrix, 24-karat gold leaf on paper, 28 × 38 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Farrington Press. Photo: Sarah Lyon.
On the cusp of twilight, the clouds spread into a vaporous canopy that resembled a bloom of ink. Later that evening, Albuquerque and Breslin traveled to Farrington Press, an off-grid printmaking studio situated in a secluded desert canyon—a turbulent excursion through muscular ravines and ancient groves of Joshua Trees, the trek a baptism for the artists invited to the site. Established in 2021 by artist and master printer Kyle Simon, formerly of Pace Prints, and his wife Sarah LaChance, the studio rests below the eponymous Farrington Observatory, an enigmatic structure built in the 1970s that the couple refurbished and now maintain. The mercurial conditions there impact every facet of the printmaking process, from the press’s calibration to the paper’s absorbency, necessitating a frontier-like ethos of resiliency and improvisation. The canyon’s otherworldly topography often functions as an active material accomplice, making Albuquerque “an ideal artist” to have on site, according to Simon, who selects his collaborations carefully. “Every day, as soon as the moon came into view, she would run to the door. Using the nature around us was second nature to her,” Simon explained, describing the press’s four-day collaboration with Albuquerque.2 Together, they collected sap from various species of native pine trees to refine as rosin for aquatints, produced atmospheric monoprints that incorporated gold leaf and powdered pigments, and experimented with soft-ground techniques informed by the numerous gestural drawings that Albuquerque created of the observatory and surrounding terrain. She gazed at the waning moon, scanned the sky for UFOs, traced the amorphous shapes of rocks, and generated rubbings from the mottled surfaces of stones. Albuquerque described this way of working as both “ancient and new,” harking back to painterly vocabularies from her earlier decades while simultaneously igniting new creative frictions, which she succinctly described to me as “guttural.”
This guttural sensation seems to have reoriented Albuquerque’s approach to the ultramarine orbs in Wonder Valley. When we spoke a few weeks later, she conveyed that this portion of the earthwork will shift forms entirely, now existing as a fugitive performance featuring her daughter Jasmine Albuquerque, a choreographer and frequent collaborator. She reflected that, while the orbs at High Desert Test Sites will continue to gestate as planned, the untamed Wonder Valley site entails a more embodied, transient approach—an interpretation no longer anchored by ultramarine pigment, a color connotative of psyche and sky, but rather by powdered crimson pigment, a hue that lodges itself in the viscera of the body and more palpably invokes the innards of the earth.
Like so much of her work, this newly planned Wonder Valley performance stems from a piece of writing. It envisions a female character cutting into the surface of a red pigment-filled earth—a choreography evocative of her handwritten instructions in the 1978 drawing that approximates the levitating UFO (“dig a trench in the ground”). Together with her ultramarine orbs at High Desert Test Sites, which Albuquerque later likened to fallen stars embedded in the ground, these earthworks seek to parse our haptic connections to the cosmic unknown while simultaneously embodying the microscopic brevity of each passing moment. My own fleeting encounter with her orbs in Wonder Valley had passed. The terrain, now a desert but once a seabed, will transpose again. I thought of the circumambulating ants and our shared moment of chromatic reverence. “I allowed the desert to share what it has to say,” Albuquerque reflected, “I listened, and I gestured back.”
About the author
Read More
