Maintenance Artist

About groundbreaking public artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles, the New York City Sanitation Department’s official artist-in-residence.

After becoming a mother disrupted her career as an artist, Mierle Laderman Ukeles

published a daring manifesto: from now on, all her acts of childcare and household

maintenance would be performance art. The Manifesto propelled Ukeles into the 1960’s

avant-garde, a largely male scene that prized the solitary creator but scorned those who

“keep the dust off the pure individual creation.”

Recognizing that this devaluation of care was systemic, Ukeles began scaling up her

maintenance revolution to include collaborations with the often invisible cleaners and

guards who care for museums — poking at the concealed hierarchies embedded in the

white cube space. In 1977, in a move that would radically reframe public art, Ukeles

was invited to establish an unprecedented artist-in-residency at the NYC Sanitation

Department, where she championed a demeaned but essential class of workers within a

vast urban system.

Set during the impassioned social and artistic upheavals of the late 20th century and

using newly digitized archival footage, Maintenance Artist is the story of an artist who

raised maintenance to an art form and became a force in contemporary art.

followed by a live in-person discussion with the film's director, Toby Perl Freilich.