PORTLAND — Internationally renowned artist Andrea Zittel, whose sculptures and installations explore how we live, what we need and personal freedom, will give a lecture Monday, Jan. 23, at the Portland Museum of Art.

The 6 p.m. program is free; a book-signing will follow.

Zittel’s work explores individualism, community and sustainable living — from her first ‘living unit,” an experiment reducing all that a person needs into a small compact space, to her commission from the Indianapolis Museum of Art to build Indianapolis Island, a fully inhabitable floating island for the museum’s lake.

For Zittel, home, furniture and clothing all become the sites of investigation in an effort to better understand human nature and the social construction of needs.

In 2010, she launched The Group Formerly Known as Smockshop project at the PMA as part of SPACE Gallery’s outdoor art and music block party. Artists from Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, Berlin and Portland created and sold garments as reinterpretation of Zittel’s designs to help other artists.

Born in 1965 in Escondido, Calif., Zittel earned a bachelor’s degree in painting and sculpture from San Diego State University and a master’s degree in sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design.

In the early 1990s, she established a practice in New York. One of her most visible projects was A-Z East, a small row house in Brooklyn that she turned into a showroom testing ground for her prototypes for living. In 1999, she moved back to the West Coast, eventually settling in the High Desert region next to Joshua Tree National Park, and founded A-Z West.

From A-Z West Zittel supports young artists’ collaborative projects as well as creating her own work. She is a co-organizer of the High Desert Test Sites and the A-Z Smockshop in Los Angeles.

Zittel has had solo exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh; Diechtorhallen in Hamburg; Whitney Museum of American Art in Altria, N.Y.; Museum for Gegenwartskunst and the Schaulager in Basel, Switzerland; Louisiana Museum in Denmark; and Magasin 3 in Stockholm.

The recently opened “Contemporary Galleries: 1980–Now” exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York includes an entire room of her works.

For more information, call 775-6148, ext. 3227; or visit www.portlandmuseum.org.