Mierle Laderman Ukeles: Maintenance Art

Exhibition Website

Sep 18 2016 - Feb 19 2017

Queens Museum

New York City, NY

Since the late 1960s, Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ performances, sculptural installations, and writing have explored issues profoundly important to society today: the role of women in society, cultures of work and labor, and urban and community resilience. Her MANIFESTO FOR MAINTENANCE ART 1969! laid out the hidden, yet essential role of maintenance in Western society—and the radical implications of actively valuing rather than dismissing or hiding it. 

This first survey of Ukeles’ work is organized by the Queens Museum’s Larissa Harris and guest co-curator Patricia C. Phillips, who initiated the project in 2012. The show will span five decades, from her work as a pioneer of feminist performance to a practitioner of “new genre public art,” in which Ukeles invites us to reconsider indispensable urban systems and the workers who maintain them. Ukeles is undoubtedly best-known for her 36+ year role as the official, unsalaried Artist-in-Residence at New York’s Department of Sanitation. Unprecedented when it began in 1977, this residency has now become a model for municipalities engaging with artists as creative agents.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website


Whether you go or not, the exhibition catalog, Mierle Laderman Ukeles: Maintenance Art, is the first comprehensive monograph devoted to Mierle Laderman Ukeles and her groundbreaking participatory art practice. Whether it’s her groundbreaking Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969!, which decries the separation, especially for women, between art on the one hand and caring for family, city, and planet on the other; or The Social Mirror, in which she covered a New York City Department of Sanitation truck entirely in mirrored glass―Ukeles's fascinating body of work includes public art installations, exhibitions, and performances around the world, frequently created in collaboration with sanitation and municipal workers, museum visitors, and the public.


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  • American
  • Contemporary
  • Urban
  • Mierle Laderman Ukeles

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