Visiting Artist: Andrea Zittel

Andrea Zittel received a BFA in painting and sculpture (1988) from San Diego State University, and an MFA (1990) in sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design. In the early 1990s she established her practice in New York, where one of her most visible projects was "A-Z East", a small row house in Brooklyn which she turned into a showroom testing grounds for her prototypes for living. In 2008 she moved back to the West Coast, eventually settling in the High Desert region next to Joshua Tree National Park where she founded A-Z West, as well as organized the "Smockshop," an artist-run enterprise, and High Desert Test Sites, a series of experimental art sites.
Her work has been included in group exhibitions such as the Venice Bienalle, Doccumenta X, Skulptur Projetke in Munster, and the 1995 and 2004 Whitney Biennials. She has had solo exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, The Diechtorhallen in Hamburg, The Whitney Museum of American Art at Altria in NY, The Museum for Gegenwartskunst in Basel, and The Louisiana Museum in Denmark. Her traveling survey show "Critical Space" has exhibited in several locations in the US, and her work was recently highlighted in the exhibition 1:1 at the Schaulager in Basel, Switzerland.
Artists representing some of the most innovative and influential work being done today come to lecture at the University of Oregon. The Department of Art brings in about a dozen artists and critics each year from across the nation and abroad to lecture and meet with students in small groups or individual studio visits. In addition to the support each media area has for such an enterprise, the two annual endowed lectures, the George & Matilde Fowler lecture and the Davis Family Lecture, bring in particularly high-profile artists and critics who challenge our assumptions about art and have broad relevance across media. These public lectures provide not only a unique opportunity to hear directly from artists about their work, but also for students to work with them directly in a more intimate capacity.