PALM SPRINGS, CA.- Palm Springs Art Museum announces Lita Albuquerque: Cosmic Land, a solo exhibition on view October 16, 2026 through May 3, 2027. Spanning nearly six decades of her practice, the exhibition marks the first time the celebrated California artist's paintings, sculptures, installations, and films are brought together in a single exhibition. Guiding viewers through a continuous, unfolding journey, Cosmic Land traces the relationship between Earth and cosmos, revealing the terrestrial and celestial as inseparable and the human being as belonging to both at once. Albuquerque's work conveys that the ground beneath our feet is deeply entwined with the broader universe, carrying within it memory, consciousness, and starlight, or as the artist herself wrote in 2014, that “light carries information.”
Albuquerque has built a practice rooted in an intentional and daily relationship with the notion that light carries information, approaching it as an ancient paradigm to be deciphered through our relationship to land, light, and the elements. Early influences from Southern California, including her mentor Robert Irwin, shaped her sense of expansive space as well as the region's singular quality of light. These ideas become spatial and experiential throughout the exhibition. Cosmic Land unfolds across four galleries, each organized where the concepts of light and matter are experienced in dynamic states.
“Southern California has long inspired artists to consider perception, consciousness, and our place within something larger than ourselves,” said Christine Vendredi, JoAnn McGrath Executive Director and Chief Curator. “Lita Albuquerque brings that inquiry to a deeply human question: how do we understand our place within the vastness of the universe?”
Visitors are welcomed by NAJMA Returns (Guardian of the Earth) (2023), a sculptural embodiment of Najma, the interstellar, consciousness-seeding, 25th-century female astronaut who appears throughout Albuquerque's unpublished manuscript GENIUS REMEMBERED. Surrounding the figure are Wind Paintings (2026), created in collaboration with the invisible movement of air itself. Albuquerque allows natural forces to become active collaborators, recording the presence of wind as both a physical phenomenon and an unseen energy.
Spine of the Earth (1980/2024/2026), Albuquerque's seminal earthwork originally realized on the dry lakebed of the Mojave Desert using powdered pigment and sacred geometry, occupies the main gallery. Conceived as a temporary intervention on the Earth's surface, the work has evolved through documentation, performance, and reconstructions while maintaining its original relationship to place, time, and planetary scale. Also featured in the gallery is Emanation (2022), whose luminous gold leaf reflects and transforms the surrounding light.
The third gallery considers Light and Water. An intimate gold sculpture Solar Disc 6,000 BC, Mali (2021) evokes both classical and celestial objects as well as an imagined vessel, bridging ancient cosmologies with speculative futures. Nearby, the films 20/20: Accelerando (2016) and Liquid Light (2022) continue the journey of Najma across terrestrial and cosmic landscapes, with water appearing as a medium of reflection, movement, and transformation.
The final gallery opens into the Cosmos with Particle Horizon (2014), a multimedia installation centered on a cast of the artist's body in repose beneath projections of the motion of the stars at the North Pole, South Pole and Equator, merging time and space as one continuous whole – a perspective that could only be seen if one was at the center of a transparent earth. Accompanied by spoken passages from GENIUS REMEMBERED, the installation invites contemplation of the point where perception, consciousness, and the unknown converge, situating the individual body within the immeasurable scale of the universe while reminding us that the cosmos is experienced through our physical presence on Earth.
Since the early 1970s, Lita Albuquerque (born 1946, Santa Monica, CA, raised in Carthage, Tunisia and Paris, France) has created an expansive body of work, ranging from sculpture, poetry, painting and multi-media performance to ambitious site-specific ephemeral projects in remote locations around the globe. Often associated with the Light and Space and Land Art movements, Albuquerque has developed a unique visual and conceptual vocabulary using the earth, color, the body, motion and time to illuminate human consciousness and our position within the universe. She represented the United States at the Sixth International Cairo Biennale, where she was awarded the Biennale’s top prize. Albuquerque has also been the recipient of the National Science Foundation Artist Grant Program for the artwork, Stellar Axis: Antarctica, which culminated in the first and largest ephemeral artwork created on that continent. Recent major exhibitions include Lita Albuquerque: Earth Skin, Michael Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles; Lita Albuquerque: The Washington Monument Project: The Red Pyramid, presented by Galerie La Patinoire Royale Bach, Olscreen, Paris; Lita Albuquerque: Malibu Line, Los Angeles Nomadic Division; Crossing Over: Caltech and Visual Culture, 1920 - 2020, California Institute of Technology, Getty PST, Pasadena, CA; Lita Albuquerque: Early Works at Galerie La Patinoire Royale Bach, Brussels; Groundswell: Women of Land Art at Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas; Lita Albuquerque: Liquid Light presented by bardoLA at 59th La Biennale di Venezia, Biennale Arte 2022; Light & Space at Copenhagen Contemporary, Denmark; Desert X AlUla 2020, Saudi Arabia; the 2018 Art Safiental Biennial, Switzerland. Her work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Getty Trust, the Whitney Museum of American Art, LACMA and MOCA, among others.
