Mierle Laderman Ukeles on Freedom, Feminism, Crisis, and Care | INTERVIEWS

Why It Matters

Ukeles’s maintenance art reframes essential labor as cultural production, urging museums and policymakers to recognize care work’s artistic and societal value.

Key Takeaways

• Ukeles redefined art by elevating maintenance work to artistic practice.
• Her manifesto linked personal freedom with systemic care and sanitation.
• 1970s NYC fiscal crisis inspired a coalition with sanitation workers.
• Queens Museum exhibition institutionalized “maintenance art” and community engagement.
• Her work challenges Western art hierarchies and gendered labor invisibility.

Summary

Mierle Laderman Ukeles, a pioneering artist born in 1939, uses this interview to trace how she transformed personal crisis into a radical artistic practice that foregrounds care work. Growing up in a restrictive 1950s environment, she left Pratt Institute for NYU, only to confront motherhood and maintenance labor, prompting a re‑examination of freedom and artistic purpose.

Ukeles coined the term “maintenance art,” a four‑page manifesto that reframed everyday tasks—changing diapers, cleaning, fixing light bulbs—as legitimate art forms. During New York City’s 1970s fiscal crisis, she mobilized 300 sanitation workers, proposing they apply for NEA performance grants, and subsequently secured a partnership with the city to stage a massive, participatory exhibition that mapped the city’s invisible labor network.

A memorable moment comes when she asks, “If maintenance can be art, what about the sanitation department?” This provocation led to a call from the city’s cultural affairs office and a year‑long “10 sweeps” tour of every district, forging a coalition of workers and artists. Support from figures like Lucy Lippard, Hannah Wilke, and Tom Finkelpearl culminated in a retrospective at the Queens Museum, cementing her ideas within institutional walls.

Ukeles’s work destabilizes Western art hierarchies, foregrounds feminist care ethics, and demonstrates how systemic labor can be both political and aesthetic. By naming necessity as art, she offers a template for institutions to recognize and valorize the essential, often invisible, work that sustains urban life.

Original Description

In 2016 Mierle Laderman Ukeles talked to Artforum about freedom, feminism, crisis, and care—some of the ideas that led Ukeles to designating herself a “maintenance artist.”

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