The artist who made the New York city sanitation department her inspiration

Tall, blond, and often clad in a vibrant green jumpsuit, the artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles stood amidst a sea of garbage at a New York City landfill to shake the hand of a sanitation worker. It was 1984, and Ukeles—the official and unsalaried artist-in-residence at the New York City Department of Sanitation—was in the process of shaking hands with every one of the 8,500 sanitation workers throughout all five boroughs as part of her performance artwork titled Touch Sanitation.

As she thanked this particular driver, he told her a story: Many years ago, on a hot, humid day, he and his colleagues sat down to rest on the porch steps of a Brooklyn home, when a woman came out and said, “Get away from here, you smelly garbage men. I don’t want you stinking up my porch.”

“For 17 years, that stuck in my throat, and today you wiped that out,” Ukeles recalls him telling her.

It is a poignant scene in a new documentary that looks back at Ukeles’s life and work, which in her case are one and the same. “That got me,” she explains over a Zoom call. “I was out-of-my-mind moved that my work could work. That was the best thing that ever happened to me as an artist, [to realize] that art could have such an impact on a human being.”

Ukeles began her career making abstract paintings and sculptural multimedia works on canvas, but everything changed when she had her first child. “The maintenance just blew me away,” she recalls. “I didn’t see Jackson Pollock or Marcel Duchamp or Mark Rothko changing diapers one after the other till I thought I was going to go berserk.” Faced with the necessity of addressing the growing chasm between her work as a mother and her work as an artist, Ukeles found herself in crisis. Then, she had “an epiphany.” “I decided, I’m going to survive,” she says. “I’m going to be able to be an artist and a mother at the same time, and to do that, I call my present work, mostly maintenance, art.”

Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Touch Sanitation Performance (1980)

The decision was emboldened by her firm belief that “art is about freedom,” something instilled in her by Robert Richenburg, the abstract expressionist artist who was also her professor at Pratt Institute, where she had been enrolled in the MFA program in the early ’60s. Though she left Pratt early—after being shunned by the administration because of their distaste for her allegedly provocative work—Richenburg’s constant refrain about freedom stuck with her, and she galvanised it into her Maintenance Art Manifesto 1969! Written in an inspired spell of feminist conviction, the manifesto invoked the Duchampian power of naming to confer on the laundry, the dishes, the shopping, and the cleaning (a.k.a. the maintenance work) that occupied her daily life, the status of art.

In the years that followed, Ukeles went on to perform maintenance tasks under the auspices of art, including at the Wadsworth Atheneum in 1973, where she washed the front steps and dusted the vitrines, and at the Whitney in 1976, where she collaborated with the 300-person maintenance staff of the large downtown office building where it was formerly located by simply asking each worker to consciously decide that for one hour each day, the labor they were performing was art.

Following her project at the Whitney, a review published in The Village Voice seeded the idea that she might collaborate with the Department of Sanitation. So in a letter to Sanitation Commissioner Anthony T. Vaccarello, Ukeles proposed that she become the department’s first-ever artist-in-residence. A phone call from the commissioner secured her inclusion among what she fittingly calls the “major leagues of the maintenance world,” with a position she would hold for over 40 years.

“For me it was perfect, because there were no female sanitation workers,” Ukeles says of the opportunity to collaborate with the entirely male workforce of the Sanitation Department. Ukeles consequently used her position as the artist-in-residence to highlight that even though the invisible maintenance workforce that kept society running was drawn along gendered lines—with women in the home and men on the streets—both groups faced a similarly hostile reception, including experiences of outsize prejudice, poor working conditions, and otherwise systematic discrimination.

Despite the radical feminist motivations behind her practice, many of Ukeles’s artist peers, feminists included, refused to acknowledge her work as art and baulked at her collaboration with a male workforce. She did find support among artists like Hannah Wilke and Ana Mendieta, who also had to deal with the public’s rejection of their explicitly feminine art, which was often criticised for being vulgar. “Our work was very different,” Ukeles says. “But what bound us together was this notion of freedom.”

Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Washing/Tracks/Maintenance: Outside (1973), performance at Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut

“I felt that second-wave feminism was going to help save my life,” she says in Maintenance Artist. She goes on to share some qualms she had with the movement, though, specifically its championing of “a male model of success in Western culture that women needed power [and thus] should be executives.” Ukeles felt that everyone else who didn’t fit this narrow professional profile was being forgotten: “Pink-collar workers, blue-collar workers, many African American women in particular felt absolutely abandoned by the feminist movement.”

At the core of Ukeles’s practice was, instead, her attempt at cultivating a greater, more inclusive unity. It enabled workers (men and women of all races and economic backgrounds) to reconnect with their agency and recapture ownership of their own labour—in essence, renewing their sense of freedom through art. “I think that has something to offer for many people in the world,” she says. For people who “spend much of their time staying alive, keeping going, working things out,” art can be a means of “keeping their humanity and dignity at the same time.”

Though the sanitation workers may have initially been perplexed by Ukeles’s presence on their crews and in their break rooms, as captured in the documentary, this effect and the profound impact of her work were eventually felt throughout the department, as a collective spirit of mutual respect and understanding was established not only amongst the workforce but with the public as well.

Maintenance Artist thus unveils the stakes of maintaining an artistic practice that pushed the boundaries of not only what being a woman or a mother could look like but of what art could be: a “zone of freedom where people can approach each other and things in an open way that maybe they never even thought about before.” Ukeles speaks from experience, knowing full well: “That’s something that art can offer.”

Lead image: Photo: Robin Holland / © Mierle Laderman Ukeles

This article is originally from harperbazaar.com in June 2026

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