Andrea Zittel

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Andrea Zittel (b. 1965) is an American installation artist.

In the early 1990s, Andrea Zittel began making art in response to her own surroundings and daily routines, creating functional objects that fulfilled the artist’s needs relating to shelter, food, furniture, and clothing. She produced her first “Living Unit”--an experimental structure intended to reduce everything necessary for living into a simple, compact system--as a means of facilitating basic activities within her 200-square-foot Brooklyn storefront apartment. In order to make customized “Living Units” and other usable artworks available to contemporary consumers, Zittel launched the one-woman corporation, A-Z Administrative Services. While some of her modernist-inspired products were designed with the intention of making daily routines easy and efficient, others, such as the pod-like “Escape Vehicles,” appealed to fantasies of isolating oneself from the outside world.

In 1999, the Public Art Fund commissioned Zittel to create a site-specific project for New York’s Central Park. Point of Interest, located at the southeast entrance to the park, comprised two giant, faux rocks--constructed from steel armatures covered in concrete--emerging from the ground. The installation served as a reminder that the park is a meticulously planned natural environment, while providing visitors with an alternative to the typical park bench. That same year Zittel created A-Z Pocket Property, a 44-ton floating concrete island anchored off the coast of Denmark, which was commissioned by the Danish government. The artist lived on the “fantasy island” for one month as an experiment in escapism and isolation.

By 2000 Zittel's ongoing project had been relocated from Brooklyn NY to a 25-acre parcel in the California desert. At “A-Z West” she continued an investigation into contemporary perceptions of freedom and personal liberation. The original pioneering spirit of the "frontier" considered autonomy and self-sufficiency as prerequisites of personal freedom. Zittel wanted to explore how perceptions of freedom have been re-adapted for contemporary living. It was her theory that personal liberation "is now achieved through individual attempts to slip between the cracks". Instead of building big ranches and permanent homesteads, today's independence seekers prefer small portable structures, which evade the regulatory control of bureaucratic restrictions such as building and safety codes. Much of her work reflects qualities that she feels create independence for the owner and user such as compactness, adaptability and transportability. Zittel found that despite moving to the desert to be alone, she ended up doing many social and public projects. At the core of the project, she found that she had always wanted to start a commune, but couldn't find others to join her til then. ^[1]

Zittel is co-organizer of a project called High Desert Test Sites which are a series of experimental art sites located along a stretch of desert communities including Pioneer town, Yucca Valley, Joshua tree, 29 Palms and Wonder Valley. These sites provide alternative space for experimental works by both emerging and established artists.

In 2006 she was appointed faculty at the Roski School of Fine Art at the University of Southern California. Since then she has continued to commute between the High Desert and Los Angeles. In 2007 her newest public project the "smockshop" will be unveiled.

Born in Escondido, California in 1965, Zittel graduated from San Pasqual High School in 1983. She received a BFA in painting and sculpture from San Diego State University in 1988, and an MFA in sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1990. She was featured on documenta X, Kassel (1997). She has had solo exhibitions at the following institutions: the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (2005); the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo (2005); the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2005); the Vancouver Art Gallery (2005); and Deichtorhallen, Hamburg (1999). Her work was included in Beyond Green: Toward a Sustainable Art at the University of Chicago’s Smart Museum in 2006 and in the 2004 Whitney Biennial. In 2005 she received the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Lucelia Artist Award. Her 1991-2005 career retrospective "Andrea Zittel: Critical Space" was exhibited in Houston (2005), New York City (2006), Buffalo (2006), Los Angeles (2007), and in Vancouver (June-September 2007).

Zittel currently lives in California and New York.