Mierle Laderman Ukeles: Maintenance Art
Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Touch Sanitation Performance, 1979-1980. Citywide performance with 8,500 Sanitation workers across all 59 New York City Sanitation districts. Courtesy of Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, photo: Robin Holland.
In 2016, the NYC Department of Sanitation provided significant in-kind support to the Queens Museum to produce Mierle Laderman Ukeles: Maintenance Art, a retrospective that spanned five decades, exploring her work as a pioneer of feminist performance and a practitioner of public art, which includes her 40+ year role as the official, unsalaried Artist-in-Residence at New York’s Department of Sanitation. Unprecedented when it began in 1978, this residency has now become a model for municipalities engaging with artists as creative agents.
Through her work, Ukeles invites us to reconsider indispensable urban systems and the workers who maintain them.
The Museum’s accompanying publication, Mierle Laderman Ukeles: Maintenance Art (Prestel: August 2016) features a major essay by Patricia C. Phillips; interviews by Tom Finkelpearl with four Sanitation Commissioners who have worked with Ukeles; contributions by Larissa Harris, Lucy Lippard, and Laura Raicovich; writings by the artist; and over 300 striking color images.
Together, important perspectives on an artist who has transformed our notions of public art and the potential for the artist in the city.
Mierle Laderman Ukeles: Maintenance Art (Prestel: August 2016)