Lita Albuquerque made a strange sort of painting in 1978 that changed her course as an artist. An abstract painter at the time, she had felt the urge to get out of her studio and work directly on the land where she lived, an artist’s colony on the bluffs of Malibu. She dug a narrow, shallow, 41-foot-long trench in the ground, running perpendicular to the Pacific Ocean, and poured powdered ultramarine pigment into it. She called it “Malibu Line” and it was the first of her many earthworks exploring the body’s relationship to land and cosmos, using bold pigments on natural materials like rocks and sand. Albuquerque, though, had a light touch, and the original “Malibu Line” disappeared within two years, overgrown by grass and wildflowers.

---

Persons: Lita Albuquerque, Robert Irwin —, Michael Heizer, Robert Smithson, ” Locations: Malibu, Albuquerque