Mierle Laderman Ukeles: Seven Work Ballets

Mierle Laderman Ukeles's 1969 "Manifesto for Maintenance Art" was a major intervention in feminist performance practices and public art. The proposition argued for the intimate relationship between creative production in the public sphere and domestic labor; a relationship whose intricacies Ukeles has been unraveling, ever since. Starting in 1977, she became an unsalaried artist-in-residence at the New York City Department of Sanitation, a position that enabled her to introduce radical public art as mainstream culture into an urban system serving and owned by the municipal population. Through archival research, this monographic publication focuses on Ukeles' work ballets; a series of large-scale collaborative performances involving workers, trucks, barges, and hundreds of tons of recyclables which took place between 1983 and 2012 in New York City, Rotterdam, the Netherlands, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Givors, France and Tokamachi, Japan.