Mierle Laderman Ukeles

Mierle Laderman Ukeles (born 1939) is a New York City-based artist known for her feminist and service-oriented artworks, which relate the idea of process in conceptual art to domestic and civic "maintenance".

She has been the Artist-in-Residence at the New York City Department of Sanitation.

Her art brings to life the very essence of any urban center: waste flows, recycling, sustainability, environment, people, and ecology.

Born in Denver, Colorado, Ukeles is Jewish and the daughter of a rabbi.

As an undergraduate, Ukeles studied history and international studies at Barnard College and later began her artistic training at the Pratt Institute in New York in 1962.

Her time at the Pratt Institute came with controversy, as her artworks (bulbous-like sculptures at the time) were deemed "over-sexed".

While one of her teachers, Robert Richenburg, resigned in protest, she left the school shortly after.

She then enrolled in art education at the University of Denver.

She married in 1966.

Two years later she had her first of three children.

After the birth of her first child in 1968, Ukeles believes that her public identity as an artist slipped into second place, because of the public perception of the role of a mother.

Initially written as a proposal for an exhibition entitled Care, the Manifesto For Maintenance Art emphasizes maintenance—keeping things clean, working and cared for—as a creative strategy.

The manifesto came about after Ukeles gave birth to her first child.

Suddenly she had to balance her time as an artist and mother, and had little time to create art.

She noted that the famous male artists that she admired never had to make such sacrifices.

She has described this feeling and the epiphany that lead to the manifesto in this way, "I felt like two separate people...the free artists and the mother/maintenance worker...I was never working so hard in my whole life, trying to keep together the two people I had become. Yet people said to me, when they saw me pushing my baby carriage, "Do you do anything?"...Then I had an epiphany... I have the freedom to name maintenance as art. I can collide freedom into its supposed opposite and call that art. I name necessity art."

The manifesto is formed into two major parts.

In part I, under the rubric 'Ideas' she makes a distinction between the two basic systems of 'Development' and 'Maintenance', where the former is associated with 'pure individual creation', 'the new', 'change' and the latter is tasked with 'keep the dust off the pure individual creation, preserve the new, sustain the change'.

In 1969, Ukeles wrote a manifesto entitled ''Maintenance Art Manifesto 1969!

Proposal for an exhibition "CARE"'', as she pondered her position as an artist and mother.

Her claim was to challenge the domestic role of women by reframing herself as a "maintenance artist".

Maintenance, for Ukeles, includes the household activities that keep things going, such as cooking, cleaning and child-rearing.

Aside from "personal" or household maintenance, the manifesto also addressed "general" or public maintenance (cleaning a building, or a street) and earth maintenance, such as addressing polluted waters.

Her exhibitions and performances were intended to bring awareness to the low social status of maintenance work, generally paying either minimum wage or no payments for housewives and workers.

During her exhibitions, she performed the same tasks that she would perform in her daily life, including entertaining guests or partaking in a Mikveh.

Several of her performances in the 1970s involved the maintenance of art spaces, including the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford.

At the Wadsworth Atheneum, Ukeles cleaned the steps of the museum's entrance, as part of the 1973 all-female exhibition c.7500, curated by Lucy Lippard.

Ukeles earned a Master's degree from New York University in 1974 in Inter-related Arts.

Since 1977, she has been the Artist in Residence (unsalaried) of the New York City Department of Sanitation.

She is the only artist to ever hold that position.

In 1989, Ukeles was commissioned by the Fresh Kills Landfill in Staten Island, to work on the reclamation project to transform the 2200-acre, largest manmade site, to a recreational park known as Freshkills Park.

Ukeles invited New Yorkers from all five boroughs to contribute palm-sized artworks made of trash.

In 2019, she received the Francis J. Greenburger Award for artists whom the art world knows to be of extraordinary merit but who have not been fully recognized by the public.

In 2020, Mierle Laderman Ukeles unveiled a new artwork entitled For ⟶ forever....

The work, a 15-second video piece, was put on display on Time Square billboards, the Queens Museum's facade, and on New York's subway screens and showed:

"Dear Service Worker, "Thank you for keeping NYC alive!" For ⟶ forever..."

The role of the artist for Ukeles is that of an activist: empowering people to act and change societal values and norms.

This agenda stems from a feminist concern with challenging the privileged and gendered notion of the independent artist.

For Ukeles, art is not fixed and complete but an ongoing process that is connected to everyday life and her Manifesto for Maintenance Art proclaims the infection of art by everyday mundane activities.

The gargantuan domestic actions that she performed primarily became inaugurated out of her role as artist and mother in the 70s.