Art News. Vasari Codex

article culture schedule Jun 6, 2025 visibility 18 link 4 artists, 1 gallery

Documentary chronicles decades of work by New York ‘maintenance artist’ Mierle Laderman Ukeles

A new feature-length documentary titled "Maintenance Artist" will premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival on June 8, chronicling the decades-long career of 86-year-old New York artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles. The film, directed by Toby Perl Freilich, traces Ukeles's pioneering concept of 'maintenance art'—reclaiming everyday tasks like diaper-changing, floor-washing, and garbage-collecting as artistic acts. It covers her unpaid role as artist in residence of the New York City Department of Sanitation, her 1970s performance shaking hands with 8,500 sanitation workers, and her first major retrospective at the Queens Museum in 2016-17.

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The Art of Performing Maintenance

This article explores the work of artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles, who in 1969 wrote her "Manifesto for Maintenance Art" after experiencing a crisis of meaning following the birth of her first child. She proposed that routine maintenance tasks—like cleaning, cooking, and laundry—could be redefined as art when performed in public, particularly in museums. The article traces her early exhibitions at the Wadsworth Athenaeum, where she swept and mopped as performance, and her later projects interviewing passersby on New York City sidewalks and embedding herself in a Manhattan office building, where she invited workers to declare their maintenance tasks art.