Artist Mierle Ukeles performed maintenance work as art for decades

Evidence

When I see them pulling weeds and arranging hoses, I often think of the artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles. Her well-known pieces include Washing/Tracks/Maintenance: Outside, a performance in which she washed the steps of the Wadsworth Atheneum, and Touch Sanitation Performance, in which she spent eleven months shaking hands with and thanking New York City’s 8,500 sanitation men, in addition to interviewing and shadowing them. She has in fact been a permanent artist in residence with the New York City Sanitation Department since 1977. — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 115

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Motherhood made Ukeles see maintenance as culturally abandoned work — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the…, 116
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Motherhood made Ukeles see maintenance as culturally abandoned work — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the…, 116