BERKELEY, CA.- This summer the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAM/PFA) presents Andrea Zittel: A-Z Travel Trailer Unit, an installation in the museum's sculpture garden that brings to mind the all-American family vacation. Through her mock-company A-Z Administrative Services, artist Andrea Zittel creates projects that blur the distinction between the conceptual and the utilitarian. One these projects, A-Z Travel Trailer Unit Customized for Miriam and Gordon Zittel (1995) is a fully functional camping trailer, customized for the artist's parents, who used it to recreate their 1960 honeymoon drive up the California coast on Highway 1. The installation will be on view June 6 through October 14, 2007. The sculpture garden is accessible to the public free of charge, and open Monday through Wednesday and Friday, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Thursday, 8 a.m. to 7 p.m.; and Saturday and Sunday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Zittel created three A-Z Travel Trailer Units for an exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1995. Each vehicle, assigned to a different pair of individuals, set out from San Diego in October of that year, then drove north for a week along separate routes to San Francisco. Evoking the look of a vintage family station wagon with its green paint and wood trim, the trailers were uniformly fabricated by a Southern California recreational vehicle company according to Zittel's specifications. Though manufactured in mass-production fashion, the trailers were conceived to be infinitely customizable, reflecting the personal needs and tastes of their inhabitants. Zittel's parents live year-round on a sailboat, accounting for the nautical touches -- a porthole bathroom mirror, family photographs of a sailing trip -- in BAM/PFA's version of the work.

Zittel's enterprise A-Z Administrative Services is headquartered on the artist's property in Joshua Tree, California. The pseudo-corporation serves as an "institute for investigative living," as she describes it, creating portable habitats, handmade uniforms, high-efficiency food systems, and other products that explore how human values systems relate to our environments of everyday living. Zittel's A-Z Travel Trailer Units -- tiny enclosures used for exploring the vastness of the great outdoors, and at once mass-produced and customized -- exemplify the artist's preoccupation with the "gray area between freedom (which can sometimes feel too open-ended and vast) and security (which may easily turn into confinement)."

Zittel generously donated A-Z Travel Trailer Unit to BAM/PFA in 2006. The museum's acquisitions committee noticed an immediate relationship between it and the work of artist collective Ant Farm, whose archives are a permanent part of BAM/PFA's collection. Similar to Zittel, Ant Farm explored freedom and confinement, mobility and immobility as embodied in motor vehicles, most famously with 1974's Cadillac Ranch, which featured a herd of automobiles impaled in the Texas prairie.