Maintenance Art

In February of 2017, documentarian Toby Perl Freilich caught the last day of a featured exhibit at the Queens Museum: “Mierle Laderman Ukeles: Maintenance Art.” Ukeles is a conceptual artist who, among many other accomplishments over six-plus decades, served as the first Artist in Residence for the New York City Department of Sanitation. 

The show—including installations, photos, sculpture, and video—was a museum-wide retrospective on Ukeles’s unique body of work. 

To her strong surprise, Freilich had not even heard the artist’s name before the exhibit’s run. “This isn’t disrespectful of Mierle, because she’s quite well-known in the art world,” Freilich reflects. “But she’s sort of an ‘artist’s artist,’ not a household name. On the other hand, I think of her as the most groundbreaking artist that you’ve never heard of.”

Her discovery of Ukeles’s work led to Freilich’s newest documentary feature, Maintenance Artist, which explores the artist’s life, work, and worldview. 

That worldview is stated clearly in the artist’s own words, in her four page typewritten MANIFESTO FOR MAINTENANCE ART 1969! Proposal for an Exhibition “CARE.” The piece explains her perspective in refreshingly frank language. 

“Maintenance is a drag; it takes all the fucking time (lit.),” the manifesto states. “The mind boggles and chafes at the boredom. The culture confers lousy status on maintenance jobs = minimum wages, housewives = no pay.”

Another section of the document reads like both a poem and a scream of exhaustion. In it, Ukeles addresses both herself and her new baby. She also hints at societal expectations for a woman’s appearance; and she reveals an understanding, decades before the terms were coined, of what feminists today call “emotional labor” and/or “the mental load” (explaining, arranging, placating, organizing)—a kind of work that falls mainly to women.

Ukeles put it this way: “clean your desk, wash the dishes, clean the floor, wash your clothes, wash your toes, change the baby’s diaper, finish the report, correct the typos, mend the fence, keep the customer happy, throw out the stinking garbage, watch out don’t put things in your nose, what shall I wear, I have no sox, pay your bills, don’t litter, save string, wash your hair, change the sheets, go to the store, I’m out of perfume, say it again—he doesn’t understand, seal it again—it leaks, go to work, this art is dusty, clear the table, call him again, flush the toilet, stay young.” 

Writer and contemporary artist Carmen Winant, a professor at the Ohio State University and a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow in photography, holds Mierle Ukeles as a professional and personal inspiration. She discovered the artist as an undergraduate art student at UCLA, about 20 years ago. “I felt somehow as if she’d been waiting for me,” she says. “I was deepening in feminism and artmaking at the same time at that stage in my life, and to find an artist who braided those values—and methods—together as she did was pretty remarkable.” 

I saw the documentary on the night of its premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival in June 2025. Like the filmmaker before the Queens exhibit, I had never heard of Ukeles. This, though the artist has been working in her field since the 1960s, has been featured consistently at museums and galleries around the world, has earned numerous grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and other prominent groups, and has received no fewer than five honorary Ph.D.s. 

I watched footage of Ukeles in the 1970s, her styled blonde hair falling past her shoulders, her voice and gaze unwavering—despite the skeptical looks she received during some of her earlier conceptual projects. I watched her speak to the camera as she is today, at 86: styled white hair still long, voice and gaze as direct as ever.

I watched her story play out: her life long dedication to feminism; her equally powerful environmentalism; her struggle to succeed on all fronts as an artist, a wife, and a mother of three; and her prioritizing of compassion and respect for the unappreciated or unseen, in her everyday actions and her work.

I resolved on that night to do my part in shining further light upon Ukeles, who has focused an affirming beam on so many others throughout her career.

Ukeles was born in Denver in 1939 and raised in a middle class Jewish neighborhood. Her father was a beloved Modern Orthodox rabbi, her mother a homemaker and, as Ukeles says, a “community builder.” Though her mother did not have a paid career, her volunteer work changed the city—an early model for her daughter’s community engagement. “Her mother helped to start the Denver Symphony Orchestra,” Freilich says. “She moved to Denver as a young married woman, with her husband’s first pulpit—and basically said, ‘I can’t live somewhere where there’s no symphony orchestra.’ So she joined with other women to raise money, and help hire a conductor, and essentially help start the symphony.”

Ukeles took art classes as a child, and “these classes were in the public library, which was in Denver’s City Hall,” Freilich says. “She told me that led her to associate art with public space, which I thought was very beautiful.” 

Wanting to expand her horizons further, Ukeles went to New York City for college; she received an undergraduate degree from Barnard in 1961, with a major in History and International Relations. She continued her education at Pratt Institute, studying painting and sculpture, as well as at the Universities of Colorado and Denver. She remembers one of her Pratt professors, abstract expressionist Robert Richenberg, equating art to freedom. “I just flipped,” she told Artforum in 2016, in an interview timed to the Queens Museum exhibit. “That was what I wanted.” She received a Masters in Interrelated Arts from NYU in 1974.

She married Jacob B. (Jack) Ukeles, a city planner, in 1966. “It’s a real partnership,” says Freilich. “I think Mierle would be the first person to say she couldn’t do it on her own.” Indeed, at the film’s premiere, the artist thanked and praised her husband, who beamed from the front row. 

The couple took seriously the idea of shared responsibility in the home. Ukeles has even described their working out a point system for various tasks, in order to have a better chance of splitting work equally. However, the arrival of their firstborn, in 1968, shifted everything. Someone would have to care for the infant; and the partner whose work did not generate a steady salary was the likely candidate. The baby girl’s thriving was Ukeles’s priority, of course—but the necessary repetition and even tedium of caretaking tasks wore her down.

She took inspiration from groundbreaking male artists. Among her artistic heroes at the time were Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Marcel Duchamp. She was especially struck by Duchamp’s declaration of the right to self-define what “deserves” to be called art. “Everything in life is art,” Duchamp said in 1968. “If I call it art, it’s art; or if I hang it in a museum, it’s art.” 

“Marcel Duchamp,” Ukeles says in the film, “gave me the gift of naming and renaming.” Still, she states, there was a disconnect. Her idols had the time and focus to make their art, while she did not. “My heroes that I looked to,” she explains, “didn’t change diapers.”

Ukeles made a decision. “If I am the boss of my freedom, then I call maintenance art,” she said to Artforum. “If I have this freedom to name, like my ‘grandfather’ Marcel gave me, I choose maintenance, and I call it art. I call necessity art. You could say that’s bullshit. So what? I name it art.”

These thoughts led to the artist’s 1969 manifesto. Typed in one sitting, it proposed an art exhibit based on maintenance and also laid out the artist’s views about labor, respect, art, and equity. 

Winant still marvels at the artist’s prescience. “I want to get across just how groundbreaking Mierle’s work was in its moment,” she says. “When she wrote the Maintenance Manifesto, in 1969—I mean this was technically pre–Women’s Liberation, to say nothing of what we now call ‘feminism.’ She understood—so early in the movement—that her work as a mother was creative, that care work could be artwork. Domestic labor as creative labor: What a revelation!”

In 1976, Ukeles expanded this idea further. She asked 300 individual maintenance workers at 55 Water Street, in downtown Manhattan, to declare one hour of each of their standard work days “Maintenance Art.” During these one-hour periods—while mopping, refilling, fixing, washing, etc.—the workers wore buttons indicating their participation in the art work. Ukeles immortalized their efforts by mounting 720 Polaroids, in a work called “I Make Maintenance Art One Hour Every Day.” It was first exhibited at what was then the downtown branch of the Whitney Museum—located on the second floor of the same Water Street building. In 2017, this work was acquired for the Whitney’s permanent collection. 

1977 saw the artist take an official leap forward with this theme; that year she became the Department of Sanitation’s first Artist in Residence. The city was experiencing dire budget issues; the DSNY was facing layoffs and possible privatization. Morale was low, as was public opinion of “garbagemen” in a city that never seemed clean enough. Ukeles aimed to call attention to the dignity, the demands, and indeed the absolute necessity of their labor.

Her first piece in this new capacity was “Touch Sanitation Performance.” From July 24, 1979 to June 26, 1980, Ukeles shadowed the city’s sanitation workers from 6 AM on through the workday. When restaurants didn’t want to serve them, she shared meals with them on the curb. One facet of the performance, called “Handshake and Thanking Ritual,” involved her facing each of the 8,500 workers individually, shaking the hands of those who agreed, and saying to each one, “Thank you for keeping NYC alive.” (“Only three sanitation workers, out of 8,500,” the artist recalls, “refused to shake my hand.”)

Through the decades, Ukeles continued to make art that highlighted sanitation workers—in the process asking viewers to think hard about who is lauded, who is ignored, and why. Invention cannot happen without maintenance, and yet society pretends otherwise. As the artist states in her manifesto, “The sourball of every revolution: after the revolution, who’s going to pick up the garbage on Monday morning?” She produced a wide variety of installations, sound pieces, and public performances to highlight these ideas. 

Freilich—who, like Ukeles, was raised in an observant Jewish home—notes a “core of Jewish ethics” throughout the artist’s work, and certainly in her Department of Sanitation projects. “She was drawing on this wellspring of ethical Jewish values—including the notion that we are all created in God’s image, and therefore are all equal—that resonated deeply for me,” she reflects. She notes in particular a 1984 performance work in which sanitation workers and their families sat and watched as artists and public officials scrubbed slurs that had been used against Sanitation Department employees from the windows of Soho’s Ronald Feldman Gallery. “It’s such a powerful performance,” Freilich says, “and to me it is such a Jewish work. It’s rooted in Judaism’s principle of Tikkun Olam—repairing the world.” 

Winant finds herself reflecting on whether Ukeles herself understands the enormity and power of her influence. “So many women of my generation, and the half and full generation below me, are emotionally, creatively, and politically attached to Mierle,” she says. “I wonder if she knows how many young women— who could be her grandchildren’s age—feel moved by her pioneering work…. I know students and professors in fields like political science, anthropology, and English who are totally devoted to, and informed by, her work.” 

Ukeles’s current work is tied to a location she has cared about deeply for over 40 years. In the late 1970s, while working on “Touch Sanitation,” she first visited the Freshkills landfill in Staten Island; in 1989, she received a Percent for Art Commission to create work for the area. She has since generated multiple projects for Freshkills—in the process examining the consumerism, waste, and reclamation tied to its history. The site was closed as a landfill in 2001 and is now, slowly, being turned into a 2,200-acre park—with Ukeles consistently involved in its evolution. “I believe the site must be redeemed, as a true social sculpture, by the public whose waste caused its four mounds to rise,” Ukeles states, “filled with the 150 million tons of garbage decomposing beneath its now-developing beautiful surface. It is art that can suggest a means of redemption.”

As lauded as Ukeles has been in the art world, Winant wonders if she has yet been under-acknowledged in the world at large. “Mierle made a connection that would evade feminists for years to follow: that her overlooked, underpaid maintenance work in the home had everything to do with overlooked, underpaid maintenance in the world.…This is a profound political act of solidarity and one that I don’t think she gets enough credit for.”

Freilich too marvels at the continuing impact of Ukeles’s work, seeing her ideas reflected in many current issues. “The current silo-ing of people in ‘identity politics’ has divided us,” she says. “Mierle earned respect and built connections even with people she might have disagreed with. Her work can be seen as an affirmation of the Old Left slogan, ‘Workers of the world, unite.’”

Pamela Rafalow Grossman writes about community, women’s health, environmental issues, and more from her home base in Brooklyn, NY.

IMAGES © MIERLE LADERMAN UKELES. COURTESY THE ARTIST AND RONALD FELDMAN GALLERY, NEW YORK.