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Mierle Laderman Ukeles Documentary chronicles decades of work by New York ‘maintenance artist’ Mierle Laderman Ukeles
The Art Newspaper Jun 06, 2025
“Good morning. My name is Mierle Laderman Ukeles and I'm a maintenance artist,” is how Maintenance Artist, a new feature-length documentary about the 86-year-old artist that will premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival on 8 June, begins. In this scene from 1979, Ukeles addresses a group of astounded truck operators in her capacity as the unpaid artist in residence of the New York City Department of Sanitation (a position she conjured, along with the term ‘maintenance artist’). “You hold up the whole city in your hands, with your unending work. I think it's time for the public to hear what New York City feels like, from the side of the people that keep it alive every single day.”
What constitutes art and who is an artist? These timeless questions have produced countless answers, but no one has answered them quite like Ukeles. Looking for a way to remain a working avant-garde artist after becoming a mother, she reclaimed the act of maintenance as art. If her hero Marcel Duchamp could sign a urinal and make it art, then she could take the necessary tasks of diaper-changing, floor-washing and garbage-collecting and make them art, too.
