Photography by Meka Boyle

LITA & ISABELLE ALBUQUERQUE

“Over forty years ago Clinic’s volunteers Irma Cohen, Ruth Bloom, Sheila Goldberg and Laura Maslon joined forces with architect Frank Gehry and artists Ed Ruscha, John Baldessari, Fred Eversley, Laddie and Guy Dill, Chuck Arnoldi, myself, and many others to create Venice Art Walk + Auction. We bandied together to support our neighbors in-Venice and created a one-of-a-kind experience, opening our studios and showing art in this colorful place with its canals and eccentric history. Light and Space. Many will remember at that time walking from one studio to the next and buying art. Today the need has grown, the Clinic has grown, and they are still opening their doors to help our neighbors get well and stay well. I am so glad to have been and continue to be part of this history.”
Lita Albuquerque


“For the last five decades, Venice Family Clinic has been a guiding light for the LA Community and beyond. In a time when basic human rights are at stake, the Clinic continues with their legacy of support to underserved communities including generations of women and the Clinic’s deep rooted programs dedicated to women’s health at all stages of life. I find it so moving when the arts community and the health community can join forces in our shared goals of imagining and creating better futures and presents for our grandmothers, mothers, aunties, nieces, sisters and daughters. This kind of coming together is essential now more than ever, and I am honored to join Venice Family Clinic in their mission of healthcare for all.”
Isabelle Albuquerque


 

About Lita Albuquerque

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 identity as part of the universal. 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, Offscreen, 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

Lita Albuquerque, Talismanic Gold, 2025
24kt gold on resin
pigment on panel
30 x 30 in.
Photo courtesy of the artist.

About Isabelle Albuquerque

Isabelle Albuquerque is an artist based in Los Angeles. She is a founding member of the performance duo Hecuba, and has performed at SFMOMA, the Walker Art Center, and the Hammer Museum. Recent sculptural exhibitions include Post Human, Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles, Orgy for 10 People in One Body, Jeffrey Deitch, New York; BodyLand, Max Hetzler, Berlin; and Sextet, Nicodim, Los Angeles. Albuquerque’s work has appeared in numerous publications including Flash Art, Artforum and The New York Times. Last year she released Orgy for Ten People in One Body (Jeffrey Deitch, Nicodim, Pacific), a 450 page monograph about the series that includes her own personal writings alongside conversations with the artists Miranda July and Arthur Jafa. Her formally powerful and psychologically charged sculpture invites multiple, simultaneous readings and creates a cross-temporal conversation that centers the experiences of women and their own connection to desire, sexuality and embodiment.

Isabelle Albuquerque’s psychologically charged work mines structures of power, desire, and transmutation through the body. She employs both human and robotic processes and uses materials such as cast bronze, hair, rubber and melting wax to encode precise moments or performances in time. The resulting works become a cross-temporal conversation that centers the experiences of women and subverts art historical constructs through new modes of multiplicity and agency. In her most recent series Orgy For Ten People In One Body, Albuquerque translates her own body through varied forms and materials to create ten headless human scaled figures in multivalent states of embodiment, ecstasy and transformation.

Isabelle Albuquerque, Fallen Limb, 2023
bronze, cupric nitrate, aleppo pine
8 x 10 x 31 in, Ed. 1/3 + 2AP
Artwork Courtesy of the Artist and Nicodim
Photo courtesy of Lee Tyler Thompson.

SIGNATURE ARTISTS – 1981 TO PRESENT

Each year, the Curatorial Committee of Venice Family Clinic Art Walk + Auction honors an artist or artists who exemplifies the spirit of the event, a devotion and dedication to the artistic community and the people the Clinic serves.

2025
Lita + Isabelle Albuquerque
2024
Fred Eversley
2023
Charles Gaines
2022
Andrea Bowers
2021
Mary Weatherford
2020
Frank Gehry
2019
Laura Owens + Gary Steinborn
2018
Alexis Smith
2017
Barbara Kruger
2016
Analia Saban + Guy Dill
2015
Alison Saar + Allen Ruppersberg
2014
Cameron Grey + Don Bachardy
2013
Larry Bell + John Van Hamersveld
2012
David Trulli
2011
Eddie Ruscha
2010
Gwynn Murrill
2009
Kenny Scharf
2008
Kenny Harris
2007
Gajin Fujita
2006
Raymond Pettibon
2005
Patssi Valdez + Robert Graham
2004
Laddie John Dill + Robbie Conal
2003
Tom Wudl + Scott Grieger
2002
Ken Price + Matt Groening
2001
Mark di Suvero
2000
Astrid Preston + Richard Serra
1999
David Hockney
1998
Joe Goode + Caryl Davis
1997
Karen Carson
1996
Ed Moses + Gronk
1995
Chuck Arnoldi + Carol Doumani
1994
Tony Berlant + Renee Petropoulos
1993
Betye Saar + Sam Francis
1992
John Baldessari + Peter Shire
1991
Lita Albuquerque + Sylvia Salazar Simpson
1990
Peter Alexander + Jeffrey Vallance
1989
Richard Diebenkorn + Laddie John Dill
1988
Ed Ruscha + Michelle Roberts
1987
Jonathan Borofsky
1986
Sandra Mendehlson
1985
Rubin Carlos Almaraz
1984
Billy Al Bengston
1983
David Hockney
1982
Sam Francis
1981
Helen K. Garber + Kwaku Alston + Lynda Lester-Slack + Aline Smithson + Robert Sturman

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