MIERLE LADERMAN UKELES After child-birth in 1968, artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles became a mother/maintenance worker and fell out of the picture of the avant-garde. In a rage, she wrote the Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969!, applied equally to the home, all kinds of service work, the urban environment, and the sustainability of the earth itself. She viewed the Manifesto as “a world vision and a call for revolution for the workers of survival who could, if organized, reshape the world.”

Inspired, also, by NYC’s “Comprehensive Plan” that split its mission into two systems -- development and maintenance -- she has created works that collide the boundaries of these two systems together, understanding them as the embodiment of opposing human drives of freedom and necessity. Her works seek to test, provoke, expand and even explode these boundaries: always raising the question “Is this work necessary?” and then asking, “What does this work do to one’s freedom?” She is “madly in love” with the public domain and public culture and sees it as “The area where everyone can be inside the picture.” Thus, virtually all her works take place in the public sphere, and deal with the public domain and public culture.

Since 1977, when she became the official, unsalaried artist-in-residence at the New York City Department of Sanitation—a position she still holds—Ukeles has created art that deals with the endless maintenance and service work that “keeps the city alive,” urban waste flows, recycling, ecology, urban sustainability and our power to transform degraded land and water into healthy inhabitable public places. Forthcoming, current and recent exhibitions are at the Art Institute of Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Tang Museum, Skidmore College, NY; Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol, UK; Istanbul Biennial; Graz Kunstverein, Graz, Austria; Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, LA; Haus Der Kunst, Munich; Barbican Art Gallery, London; Montalvo Art Center, California; Ronald Feldman Gallery, New York; P.S. 1/MOMA, New York; the Sharjah Biennial, UAE; the Armory Art Show, NYC; the Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco; the Echigo Tsumari Triennial 2012, Japan; the Bronx Museum of Arts; the Queens Museum, New York; and the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford; WACK! Art & the Feminist Revolution beginning at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art and traveling; the Sharjah Biennial 8, United Arab Emirates; and Hiriya in the Museum at the Tel Aviv Museum.

Manifesto for Maintenance Art, 1969!; image courtesy of Ronald Feldman Gallery and of the artist.