For almost 30 years, the artist Lita Albuquerque and her family lived in a multi-structure compound on a four-acre Malibu hilltop. It was where she and her husband, Carey Peck, had raised their children. It was where she had built a studio as well as a structure to house an archive that documented her work: the land art; the conceptual and performance art; and the drawings, paintings, and sculptures that made her a significant figure in Southern California’s Light and Space movement, which emerged in the 1960s. Parts of her work were being prepared to be archived at the Smithsonian. Her personal library at the house sheltered many years’ worth of notebooks filled with ideas, stories, and the narratives behind her art. She had kept personal artifacts from her mother’s and her grandmother’s lives, including 78 rpm records of her grandmother, Rachel Sitbon Hayat, who was a celebrated singer of malouf (Andalusian Arabic Jewish song) under the name Smarda el Olgia. And of course, she had her collection of pigments, specially formulated for her works and a trademark of her style.
On the evening of November 8, 2018, Albuquerque and Peck were staying overnight in downtown Los Angeles, after seeing the L.A. Opera. The next morning, their son, Christopher Peck, called to inform them that flames had been reported on the other side of the 101 from the family’s compound in Encinal Canyon. The Woolsey Fire would blaze a path of indiscriminate destruction across Malibu, burning almost 100,000 acres of property, taking three lives, and consuming or damaging more than 1,500 structures.
This article appears in Issue 28 of Alta Journal.
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Albuquerque’s youngest daughter, Jasmine Albuquerque, a choreographer and dancer, was in the Malibu home and eight months pregnant at the time. After a series of frantic phone calls with her mother, Jasmine escaped, grabbing her laptop and as many of her mother’s notebooks as she could. With the powerful Santa Ana winds fanning the flames, the demon fire raced through Encinal Canyon—and consumed all that Albuquerque had built, created, and gathered from her own creative life and from her mother and grandmother. Even the pigments, all burned to dust.
A few months after, I was seated next to Albuquerque at a dinner in the home of gallerist Ernie Wolfe. She was still in distress from the fire’s wanton destruction, which had made a mockery of the existential questions Albuquerque addressed in her art: Where is home? How are we connected? What is family? How can we live in harmony with the planet and the universe? Albuquerque wasn’t sure she could go on making art.
Malibu was more than just her longtime home. It was a source of inspiration. Her breakthrough work as an artist came in 1978: Malibu Line, a trench, 14 inches wide by 41 feet long, that was filled with an ultramarine pigment. Perched on a ledge above the Pacific, the work visually led the viewer’s eye over the cliff’s edge and straight into the ocean and the horizon.
Several experiences in Albuquerque’s early life are key to fully understanding the source of her art. When she was a student at UCLA, she spent a summer in London, where the paintings of J.M.W. Turner inspired her to think abstractly. Back home, a friend, visual artist Robert Overby, was closing his printing business and gave Albuquerque stacks of 35-by-45-inch paper, on which she started making charcoal-mark “earth drawings.” An exhibit of the work at a group show of Venice, California, artists launched her career.
But it was seeing how installation artist Robert Irwin could use black tape to transform a room that “changed my brain completely,” Albuquerque says. “With a simple mark, you can change the space into volume.” She began collecting rocks, which she would cover in dry-powder pigments. Overby, seeing her pigment work, told her, “That’s your mark. No one else can do it.”
Albuquerque had felt that her paintings were too personal, and she sought escape in this new medium. However, the new work couldn’t help but be personal as well. Malibu Line, she says, was born of a longing for her father. “I would wait for him in front of my mother’s house, and we were on the beach, and every ship that would come by, I thought he would come.”
She describes her mother, Ferida Esther Hayat, as “an extraordinary woman who broke the rules of the 20th century.” At 23, Hayat became a successful playwright under the pen name Fred Harlen. She returned home to Tunis in 1940 as her mother was dying and the Nazi invasion was looming. At her mother’s urging, she boarded a ship to the United States, on which she met a Portuguese Jewish diamond dealer, Maurice Yaeche Albuquerque, who was traveling with his wife. By the time they debarked, Hayat and the Albuquerques were a throuple. They settled in Los Angeles, where Maurice opened a jewelry store in Beverly Hills.
A son was born, and in 1946, Cecilia, who would be known as Lita, arrived in Santa Monica. When Lita was five months old, Hayat and the Albuquerques broke up. After filing a lawsuit to force Maurice to acknowledge paternity, Hayat returned to Tunisia with her children and enrolled Lita, then three, as a boarding student in a convent school so exclusive that the king’s children had attended it.
Tunisia imprinted itself on Albuquerque: the golden North Africa sun during the day; at night, the sky full of stars. There were frequent trips to the Roman ruins of Carthage, where she played among the rocks, stones, and columns of a once-great civilization. Next to Carthage was Sidi Bou Said, a city of white and intensely blue buildings. She celebrated Jewish holidays with her family; at school, she was immersed in the Catholic mysteries; and daily she heard the muezzin’s calls to prayer in Arabic. Home was a place where the wind moved the sand beneath your feet.
When Albuquerque was 11, her mother returned the family to the United States. Albuquerque left Tunis, but Tunisia would never leave her.
Her mother’s lifestyle, and Albuquerque’s own creative career, taught her the importance of being rooted in a place, physically and spiritually. To make your mark on the planet, Albuquerque understood, you needed to know your place in the universe. Malibu was the place.
Her career has been one long intervention in nature with pigment. In 1980, she created one of her most celebrated works, Spine of the Earth, a 600-foot-wide spiral of red, yellow, and black pigment in the Mojave Desert. As for the way she applied the pigment, with a sifting strainer, that, too, was personal. It may have come, Albuquerque says now, “from making couscous.”
“It came so naturally to me,” she observes. “My daughter says, ‘Mom, you paint the earth.’ ” The past remains her inspiration. It is as if the memory of the rocky landscape of Tunisia and its blue sea is, despite the windblown sand, the home her father and mother could not provide.
As a female artist who was the daughter and granddaughter of artists, Albuquerque raised her children to be in nature rather than bombarded by the media. Her Malibu home provided the perfect environment. “It was Tunisia for me. It was my dream,” she says. “The children, who are amazing, had creative friends, dancers and filmmakers. It was a big, creative place.” Like her younger daughter, her eldest, Isabelle, is now an artist.
With the fire, Albuquerque lost all the tangible artifacts of her life. Many of her artworks had been ephemeral, but the documentation was not. She had staged interventions that asserted her artistic vision within the natural world. And nature had struck back, erasing her artistic history not through slow decay but through instant destruction. “It was,” Albuquerque says with understatement, “a shock.”
And yet, she discovered the strength of the community surrounding her. “I was very lucky,” Albuquerque says. “The art world and Jasmine’s dance world were just extraordinary toward us.” Architect David Hertz gave the family the use of a Tony Duquette–designed house on his Malibu property; painter Chuck Arnoldi contacted an acquaintance who lent Albuquerque a studio in Venice. Artist Lauren Bon offered the Barn, architect A. Quincy Jones’s former home and office, where the family lived while work began on rebuilding what they had lost.
After a period of mourning, Albuquerque returned to making art with a new energy, a new freedom. It was as if the loss of all that was to be archived and filed away for history freed Albuquerque’s past to become present—and her present expanded to encompass a broader range of work, in all mediums, at times in collaboration with her daughters. And increasingly, in the presence of NAJMA.
Several years before the fire, Albuquerque was lying on a massage table, receiving chakra work, when she “felt a presence” behind her. She went home and wrote about it, creating the narrative of NAJMA, a 25th-century female astronaut who had come to Earth to teach us about our relationship to the stars. (Najma is the Arabic word for “star.”)
Since then, NAJMA—a figure made of synthetic composite resin in Albuquerque’s signature blue pigment, with a long train crafted of metal disks—has been part of installations and live performances at sandy sites such as the pyramids at Giza and Desert X AlUla in Saudi Arabia. She appeared at the entrance of the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas for the exhibition Groundswell: Women of Land Art, her body a bluer blue than sky or water, presented as a link between past, present, and future, between the heavens and the earth, to situate the human, the female, in our temporal journey. At other outdoor and indoor locations, she is often lying on her side, listening to the earth.
Albuquerque’s work has always been a form of astrophysics, an exploration of the universe and our place in it. Over the years, she has studied Islamic art and architecture, physics, and a variety of other disciplines. The artist Yves Klein, who also worked in blue pigment, famously claimed the sky as his own. As an artist and as a woman, Albuquerque pondered what she could claim as hers. “I claim the relationship between the earth and the sky,” she tells me. The magic in Albuquerque’s work is in how objects, and even people, are aligned in ways that create a tension and a connection that is feminine—and situates Albuquerque herself in the work.
Over an intended trilogy of films, NAJMA’s story unfolds. In the first film, 20/20: Accelerando, she crash-lands on Earth; the impact causes her to forget her mission. In the next, Liquid Light, which was shot in Bolivia and premiered as a multimedia installation (with choreography by Jasmine) at the 2022 Venice Biennale, NAJMA “seeks to reacquaint us with our stellar origins,” Albuquerque explains. The third and concluding film, Everything Is Light, is planned for 2025.
As Albuquerque has revisited her earliest work and made new work, she has discovered that what ties it together is our “relationship to our bodies, to the earth, to the cosmos.” A recent exhibition in Brussels, Early Works, included a 150-meter-wide re-creation of Spine of the Earth. During this year’s Frieze Los Angeles, she led a studio visit and a meditation session. She has two shows slated for the Getty’s fall initiative, “PST Art: Art & Science Collide”; a young curator is preparing an exhibit in Tunisia and Los Angeles around the theme of matrilineal heritage; there is also an upcoming show in Shanghai.
On a recent winter morning, I drove out to Encinal Canyon to meet Albuquerque at the site where her home formerly stood. More than five years have passed since the fire, and she estimates it will be at least another six months before she can move into her new home. What was once a series of cottages and other structures will become a Malibu version of a Tunisian home: all white, with a central dome on the roof. Because the property’s many trees were consumed by the fire, there are now amazing 180-degree views of the canyon and out to the vastness of the Pacific.
As we stood looking at the ocean receding into the horizon, Albuquerque turned to me. “My husband was saying that it’s not about rebuilding,” she offered. “It’s really about reinvention.”•
Correction: This story was updated on June 28, 2024, to correct the date Albuquerque attended the L.A. Opera and the material used to construct the NAJMA figure. The article also misstated that Albuquerque participated in a group show in Venice, California. The show featured artists from Venice but was exhibited in Pasadena.
Tom Teicholz is an L.A.-based journalist who has written extensively about modern and contemporary art.
