attend one of these lectures and write a 700 word response

Andrea Zittel: William and Stephanie Sick Distinguished Professor

Wagon Station in situ at A-Z West, 2011. A-Z Wagon Station customized by Chuck Moffitt 2003, powder-coated steel, MDF, aluminum, Lexan.
Closed: 61 x 82 x 57 inches, Open: 91 x 82 x 57 inches. Photo: Jessica Eckert. Courtesy of Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York

Monday, September 9, 6:00 p.m.
The Art Institute of Chicago, Rubloff Auditorium, 230 S. Columbus Dr.

Since the early 1990s, Andrea Zittel has used the arena of her day-to-day life to develop and test prototypes for living structures and situations. The experiments are at times extreme—such as wearing a uniform for months, exploring the limitations of living space, and living without measured time. However, one of the most important goals of this work for Zittel is to illuminate how we attribute significance to chosen structures or ways of life and how arbitrary any choice of structure can be. Zittel uses her work in order to try to comprehend values such as "freedom," "security," "authorship," and "expertise." She is interested in how concrete and rational qualities are often subjective or invented. Zittel's A–Z enterprise encompasses all aspects of daily living. Home furniture, clothing, and food all become the sites of investigation in an ongoing endeavor to better understand human nature and the social construction of needs. Andrea Zittel is based in Joshua Tree, California, where she founded A–Z West and is a co-organizer of the High Desert Test Sites and the A–Z smockshop. Zittel has had solo exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Deichtorhallen, Hamburg; Museum of Contemporary Art, Basel; and the Louisiana Museum, Humlebaek, Denmark, among others.  

Established in 2006 by a generous gift from William and Stephanie Sick, this distinguished professorship enables internationally renowned artists and designers to visit and teach at SAIC.