Awards
2006 Artist Award for Distinguished Body of Work
Andrea Zittel
Andrea Zittel
Andrea Zittel has produced an exceptionally creative body of work that illuminates emerging currents of exchange between collective and personal spaces, sculpture and design, and architecture and geography. Most widely known for her functional reconstructions of everyday living spaces, Zittel’s production includes large-scale public art projects, furniture, clothing, travel trailers, performance, and communal sites for artistic production. These artworks emerge as serial investigations of an acutely contemporary desire for both personal autonomy and collective experience in Western societies. This conflicted desire plays out, as she demonstrates, in psychic encounters with various forms of spatial habitation, nostalgic evocations of modernist utopias, and dreams about life on a frontier. Zittel’s production engages forms of interactivity aligned with subliminal experiences constructed with computers, especially her embrace of individualized fantasies as content and her hybrid conceptions of sculpture, fashion, architecture, and design. Her work also illuminates a corner of contemporary feminism with its dual focus on domestic spaces and an industrial formalism that references Minimalism and the Bauhaus. Zittel said, in a 2005 interview:
One of the most important goals of this work is to “illuminate” how we attribute significance to chosen structure or ways of life, and how arbitrary any choice of structure can be. I do not mean to deny how oddly meaningful these structures can be. Instead, I use my work to try to comprehend values such as “freedom,” “security,” “authority” and “expertise.” I am interested in how qualities we feel are totally concrete and rational are often subjective, arbitrary or invented. Since I think that “Art” is often seen as an area of expertise, a field requiring a vast body of knowledge in order to understand, I hope my work ultimately bridges the most basic human concerns with those of contemporary artistic concerns.
Zittel is the 2005 winner of the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Luciela Award, granted to a United States artist under the age of fifty for exceptional creativity and production of a significant body of work “emblematic of this period in contemporary art.” Her midcareer retrospective, Andrea Zittel: Critical Spaces, opened this year at the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, and is traveling to the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; and the Vancouver Art Gallery, British Columbia.
Jury: Margot Lovejoy, Purchase College, State University of New York, chair; Margo Machida; Patricia Failing, University of Washington; and Richard Kalina, Fordham University.
