Land Art in Malibu Gets a Second Chance

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. From some viewpoints the bright blue color appeared to run into the sea, visually connecting that strip of earth to the ocean and horizon.

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. It’s now celebrated for bridging Light and Space art — like the perceptual experiments of Robert Irwin — and the Earthwork movement, which was, for too long, defined by male artists of the 1960s and ’70s such as Michael Heizer and Robert Smithson, who used heavy machinery like bulldozers to transform — some say scar — the land.

Albuquerque, though, had a light touch, and the original “Malibu Line” disappeared within two years, overgrown by grass and wildflowers. “The beauty of the ephemeral is what it teaches us about nature — here we are, trying to control things, and nature is so powerful and will do what it does,” said Albuquerque, 78, standing outside her home in Malibu where she is recreating this artwork for the first time. It has the same intense color and southern orientation but, 46 years later, different resonances.

The most striking difference: this mark will have a counterpart in Tunisia, home of her mother’s family. She plans to create by the end of 2025 an extension of the line in Sidi Bou Said, a blue-and-white village overlooking the Mediterranean, not far from the Catholic convent in Carthage where she was a boarding student early on.

“This project is about longing and belonging. I miss the spirituality and sensuality of Tunisia,” the artist, who was born in Los Angeles and returned there at the age of 11, said. She had already dug the new Malibu trench — somewhat longer and wider to fit a new terrain — with the help of assistants and was in the process of pouring the pigment herself. The painter Marc Breslin, her former studio manager, handed her plastic cups filled with the vibrant blue powder.