Mierle Laderman Ukeles - Seven Work Ballets;

New York activist artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles s 1969 manifesto Maintenance
Art: Proposal for an Exhibition was a major intervention in feminist performance
and public art challenging the domestic role of women. Ukeles proclaimed herself
a maintenance artist arguing for the intimate relationship between creative
production in the public sphere and domestic labor a relationship whose
intricacies she 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. This substantial
and long overdue monograph documents her art ballets, a series of large-scale
collaborative performances involving workers, trucks, barges and tons of recyclables
performed between 1983 and 2012. Texts by Kari Conte, Krist Gruijthuijsen plus a
conversation with Ukeles, Tom Finkelpearl and Shannon Jackson.