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NEW YORK - Some visitors to the New Museum of Contemporary Art/Chelsea might mistake the artist Andrea Zittel's uniforms for a still life fashion presentation.
But like much of what she does, Zittel's handmade dresses are more complicated than that. For starters, she was known to wear an individual piece for weeks or even months, a habit that hammered home her practice of using everyday necessities as the impetus for her artwork.
In the last 15 years, Zittel has created a following for her art, which questions how individuals function in our brand-heavy society. In the early Nineties, well before Brooklyn's Williamsburg neighborhood became a haven for artists, she was there, pipelining her needs and fantasies about clothing, shelter and furniture into art, even using her home as an exhibition space.
Zittel came up with the idea of wearing a uniform in 1990, when, as a new graduate student living in fashion-minded Manhattan, she was overwhelmed by having to spiff up her appearance after hours of toiling in her studio for her part-time job in an art gallery. That same year, she set up A-Z Administrative Services, a company...