A new documentary film is spotlighting Mierle Laderman Ukeles, a Jewish feminist who has served as the artist-in-residence at New York City’s Sanitation Department for nearly five decades.
Now 86, Ukeles became an unlikely fixture of the department after pitching the idea during New York City’s 1970s fiscal crisis, transforming municipal labor into conceptual art. The film, “Maintenance Artist,” directed by Toby Perl Freilich, traces her career and the philosophy behind her work, which elevates everyday acts of “maintenance,” often associated with women, into a form of artistic and social expression.
From manifesto to municipal art
In 1976, deep in New York City’s fiscal crisis, Ukeles read a review of her conceptual work in The Village Voice. In it, critic David Bourdon posed a radical suggestion inspired by her thesis, asking whether municipal work, such as that of the Sanitation Department, could be considered conceptual art and funded by grants rather than the city.
Ukeles presented the idea to Sanitation Department commissioner Anthony T. Vaccarello, who invited her to create art for 10,000 sanitation workers. The position was unpaid, but she would go on to hold it for nearly 50 years.
The film’s title refers to Ukeles’ 1969 manifesto, which declared that everyday activities often relegated to women, including cooking, cleaning, and changing diapers, were “maintenance art.”
A career shaped by belief
The film spans Ukeles’ career, from her work with the Sanitation Department to her early activism on behalf of Tanzanian independence. The throughline, she said, has been a belief rooted in her Jewish identity that people are more than the roles society assigns to them.
“As a Jew, I was in love with the notion of freedom,” Ukeles said. “This message of art as freedom, I felt that’s what I’m about. That’s what I’m for.”
As artist-in-residence, Ukeles plans, stages, and documents public works of performance and conceptual art, recognizing sanitation workers. After initial staging, the works are often exhibited through photographs in museums or galleries.
Jewish identity and artistic influence
Despite being dubbed New York’s “trash artist” because of her role, Ukeles does not physically work in dumpsters or landfills. Much of her art instead draws from her Jewish values, shaped by her upbringing as the daughter of an Orthodox rabbi and her life between New York and Israel.
Some of her work explores Jewish themes and traditions, including the creation story and the mikvah, or ritual bath.
A 2010 interactive piece, “Birthing Tikkun Olam,” invited participants to reflect in a glass mirror installation and then make a “covenant” to repair the world. Their responses were collected and exchanged for a mirror in the piece, which was staged at the Yeshiva University Museum.
Faith and practice
“The site of the art is going to move out into the world, and with it, the acts that you will do,” Ukeles said at the time.
Though she does not define herself strictly as a Jewish artist, preferring to avoid categorization, Ukeles observes Shabbat and has turned down opportunities such as a stint in the Peace Corps and Friday-night gallery openings to maintain her observance. She lives in Israel, where she advises students at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design and attends a partnership minyan aimed at expanding women’s participation in Orthodox Judaism.
“I have many deep beliefs in great Jewish ideas and commitments,” she said.
The filmmaker’s perspective
For Freilich, the daughter of Polish Holocaust survivors and a descendant of Hasidic dynasties, Ukeles’ identity was central to her decision to make the film.
“Her reading of Jewish texts, her reading of Jewish philosophy, of Judaism was profoundly moving to me because it emphasized things like ‘we’re all created in God’s image,’ and we’re all equally deserving of respect and honor, or that the profane is the pathway to the sacred,” Freilich said. “These are deep kinds of concepts in Judaism that a lot of people aren’t really that familiar with.”
Freilich said she was inspired to tell Ukeles’ story after visiting a 2016 retrospective of her work at the Queens Museum.
“I was completely, really blown away,” Freilich said.
A legacy still unfolding
Ukeles’ works, funded by grants, endowments, fellowships, and commissions, span multiple media, including performance and landscape art.
One of her best-known projects, conducted between 1979 and 1980, involved shaking the hands of all 8,500 sanitation workers in New York City, an effort documented in a series of photographs.
“They were looked down upon,” Ukeles said. “Not race, not religious, not ethnic, but as a kind of class of maintenance workers and names that people were called."
Looking ahead
Approaching her 50th year with the Sanitation Department, Ukeles continues to develop new projects. She is involved in two initiatives at Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island, once the largest landfill in the world. One is the ongoing conversion of the landfill into a public park, set to be completed in 2036, and the other is an overlook above the park.
“I now call it ‘intergenerational,’ because it’ll probably take other people to pick it up,” Ukeles said.
“There’s a Jewish source of that notion that the earth is sacred and that we have to redeem the earth when it’s been degraded,” she said. “I don’t know if it will ever finish.”