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.

Andrea Zittel was born in Escondido, California in 1965. 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 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.

Zittel currently lives in California and New York.