1st Floor, Wisch Family Gallery

Image: Lita Albuquerque, Stellar Axis – Antarctica (Altair), 2014, pigment print, 60 x 60 in., © Lita Albuquerque, Center for Art + Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art

In 2006, artist Lita Albuquerque led an expedition to the farthest reaches of Antarctica near the South Pole to create the site-specific installation Stellar Axis: Antarctica. The expedition was aided by a grant from the National Science Foundation and was the first and largest ephemeral artwork created on the continent. This journey to the ice included a team of experts, researchers, and artists with Albuquerque at the helm. Their sole purpose was to pursue and materialize a sculpture and ephemeral event on a scale and in a place that was completely unprecedented.

The resulting installation consisted of an array of 99 fabricated blue spheres. Each placement corresponded to the location of one of 99 specific stars in the Antarctic sky above, creating an earthly constellation at the earth’s pole. As the planet rotated and followed its orbit, the displacement between the original positions of the stars and the spheres drew an invisible spiral of the earth’s spinning motion. The Nevada Museum of Art, Center for Art + Environment, home to Lita Albuquerque’s Stellar Axis archive, organized an exhibition and published a major monograph of the work in 2014.

The Anderson Collection is honored to present one of Albuquerque’s remaining spheres from that installation, exhibited along with a video and photos inspired by her time in Antarctica and a signature painting.

On April 24, Albuquerque will deliver the Burt and Deedee McMurtry Lecture on the North Lawn between the Anderson Collection and the Cantor.

Press

Stellar Axis at the Anderson Collection draws connections between Earth and sky, Stanford Report, April 24, 2024

Mirroring Heaven on Earth: Stellar Axis South and 90 Degrees North, Made in Bed Magazine, February 6, 2024

Making Intergalactic and Intergenerational Art, New York Times, December 28, 2022

Past Lecture

About the Artist

Since the early 1970s, Lita Albuquerque (born 1946, Santa Monica, CA) 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.

Albuquerque represented the United States at the Sixth International Cairo Biennale, where she was awarded the Biennale’s top prize. She has also been the recipient of the National Science Foundation Artist Grant Program for Stellar Axis: Antarctica, three NEA Art in Public Places awards, an NEA Individual Fellowship grant, a fellowship from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation and MOCA’s Distinguished Women in the Arts award.

Her work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Getty Trust, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Museum Of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, among others. She was on the core faculty of the Fine Art Graduate Program at Art Center College of Design for 35 years.

This exhibition is organized by the Anderson Collection at Stanford University. We gratefully acknowledge the lenders and support from museum members and the Anderson family. We thank Lukas Périer for his participation.