Lita Albuquerque was born in Santa Monica, California, and raised in Tunisia and France. She received her BFA at the University of California, Los Angeles, and continued her education at the Otis Art Institute. Since the late 1970s Albuquerque has focused on large-scale ephemeral works that take place in the open landscape. These include The Washington Monument (1980), The Great Pyramids (1996), Stellar Axis: Antarctica (2006), One Small Section of the Sky (2012), and Hearth (2017) for the inaugural edition of DesertX.

Albuquerque’s work is included in the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution, the Whitney Museum Of Art, the Museum Of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Getty Trust, the Los Angeles County Museum Of Art, the Orange County Museum of Art, Palm Springs Art Museum, and Laguna Art Museum. Among the themes Albuquerque continues to explore in her work are mapping, the cosmos, and connectivity.

Lita Albuquerque began An Elongated Now at sunrise on Saturday, November 8, 2014. The moment marked the beginning of a “now” that stretched into sunset, culminating in the act of some two hundred participants, all dressed in white and forming an arc close to the water’s edge on Main Beach, observing the setting sun. Starting with an individual at sunrise and ending with many at sunset, the performance was also a testimony to the power of the collective.