ELIZABETH BARBARA HITZ

artist     designer     developer

I was born in Connecticut, USA to Swiss parents. My father was an engineer, and his work took us to Brazil for several years of my childhood and then to the French side of Switzerland, where I grew up.

After earning my masters in art and painting from the Ecole Supérieure d’Art Visuel in Geneva, I received the first of two prestigious Eidgenössisches Stipendium awards for young Swiss artists.

Following graduation, I stopped in New York while en route to visit my great aunt in British Columbia, Canada and fell in love with it. I moved to the city soon after, living in the East Village and working in a shared artist’s loft in Dumbo for one year. Upon my return to Europe, I stayed in Barcelona for a few months, before receiving my second Lissignol award in Geneva and the Bourse Patino, which provides an artist’s studio at the Cité Internationale des Arts in the Quartier du Marais in Paris.

While exhibiting drawings and paintings in solo and group shows in Switzerland, New York, and Germany, I started doing a lot of silkscreen printmaking and became interested in street art installations as well. Everyday life — the metamorphose of found objects — had always inspired my art, but I also loved the idea of bringing art into everyday use, and by doing so, mixing high and low culture. This concept led to a commission to create a paper shopping bag for the largest supermarket in Switzerland, followed by designing my own collection of commercially printed cards that were widely distributed and sold all over Europe and the United States.

After moving back to New York and living and working as an artist in several different neighborhoods (the Bowery, the Lower East Side, Williamsburg, Tribeca, and the West Village), I started developing a taste for the city’s amazing housing stock, and bought my first investment building in 1997. This got me started restoring distressed buildings, mostly in Harlem at first but later in Greenwich Village and Williamsburg.

Since 2005, I’ve been working as an artist developer, purchasing land and developing my own architectural projects — working in close collaboration with Seema Singh. Architectural development, as a creative media, may have come naturally through my paternal side: not only is my father an engineer but so were both his parents, and my grandmother was the first woman to graduate as an engineer in Switzerland in the 1920s. But I attribute my avoir l’oeil (artistic eye) to my mother, whose design and fashion sense has influenced me since I was a child. She made me draw and paint. She took me along to flea markets and art exhibitions and really taught me how to see.