10/21/2026
FROM THE ARCHIVES
Vito Hannibal Acconci | Making Shelter: House of Used Parts (1986)
The compact shelter constructed of discarded materials sits in a city garden, lush with flowers and foliage behind a plain wooden fence. Four chair backs, made from aluminum ladders, hold up a pitched roof consisting of two doors in a wooden frame. Between the chairs is a pup tent which doubles as a table base. Climbing one of the ladders up into the attic room, you find rubber tires fastened closely together to form a hammock.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Vito Acconci (b. 1940-2017, New York, NY) was an American performance, video and installation artist, whose diverse practice eventually included sculpture, architectural design, and landscape design. His performance and video art was characterized by "existential unease," exhibitionism, discomfort, transgression and provocation, wit and audacity, and often involved crossing boundaries. His work is considered to have influenced artists including Laurie Anderson, Karen Finley, Bruce Nauman, and Tracey Emin, among others.
In the late-1970s, he turned to sculpture, architecture and design, greatly increasing the scale of his work, if not his art world profile. Over the next two decades he developed public artworks and parks, airport rest areas, artificial islands and other architectural projects that frequently embraced participation, change and playfulness.
Retrospectives of Acconci's work have been organized by the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (1978) and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (1980), and his work is in numerous public collections, including those of the Museum of Modern Art and Whitney Museum of American Art. He has been recognized with fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1976, 1980, 1983, 1993), John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1979), and American Academy in Rome (1986). Acconci died on April 28, 2017, in Manhattan at age 77.
Learn more at https://mattress.org/art/art-archive/
