Andrea Zittel has designed a floating island titled Indianapolis Island to be installed in 100 Acres’s 35-acre lake, a dominant feature of the park’s landscape. About 20 feet in diameter, the island will be fully inhabitable and will serve as an experimental living structure that examines the daily needs of contemporary human beings. Each summer the Island will be occupied by one or two residents, who are also students from Herron School of Art & Design in Indianapolis. They will collaborate with Zittel by adapting and modifying the island’s structure according to their individual needs. They will be outfitted with a row boat and will have access to a handheld PDA that enables them to share pictures and to blog and Twitter about their island experience. The island resident will interact with park visitors throughout the summer, sharing information about the living art experiment and the park itself. The project blends elements of environmental art, sculpture, design and performance in a unique way, offering a challenging and experimental forum for exploring ideas about individualism and self-sufficiency, which have long-standing connections to the history of modernism.

Andrea Zittel (b. 1965) lives and works in Joshua Tree, California. She received her MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1990, and a BFA with honors from San Diego State University. She has been the subject of one-person exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of Art at Altria and the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and the Vancouver Art Gallery in Canada. Zittel has been included in numerous group shows at institutions such as Kunstmuseum Bonn in Germany, the Smithsonian Museum of American Art in Washington, D.C., the National Art Center in Tokyo, Japan, Van Abbemuseum in the Netherlands, the Museo d’Arte Contemporanea in Rome, Italy, and the Museum fur Gegenwartskunst in Basel, Switzerland. She has received awards such as the AICA Award for Best Architecture or Design Show in 2007, the College Art Association Distinguished Body of Work Award in 2006, and the Lucelia Artist Award from the Smithsonian American Art Museum in 2005. Zittel has been the subject of a number of monographic works, and has been included in numerous exhibition catalogues and other publications.

Slideshow: Andrea Zittel, A-Z Prototype for Pocket Property, 1999. © Andrea Zittel. Courtesy of the artist and Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York.