Andrea Zittel

It’s been twenty-five years now since Andrea Zittel initiated her eponymous “A–Z” enterprise, the generative Gesamtkunstwerk that has become, for all intents and purposes, indivisible from her life. Run out of a complex she’s built over the last decade and a half in the desert a couple of hours east of Los Angeles, the artist’s “institute of investigative living” has grown to encompass furniture and home design, as well as clothing, textiles, food, and more. Descended from both Donald Judd’s experiments in Marfa, Texas, and such counterculture-era utopian communities as Paolo Soleri’s Arcosanti in central Arizona, Zittel’s diverse and estimable practice is, as she herself has observed, finally about lived experience. She’s obviously not the first artist to decamp from the regimes of the cultural capitals for the open spaces of the American west; nor is she alone in her decision

— Jeffrey Kastner