Maintenance Artist
Description
Maintenance Artist is the first feature documentary about the revolutionary public artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles, the New York City Sanitation Department’s artist-in-residence. Ukeles, inspired by Marcel Duchamp, pioneered the notion that routine maintenance – from changing diapers to picking up city trash to caring for the earth – could be acts of performance art. With never-before-seen archival footage, Maintenance Artist tells a story of essential workers and radical contemporary art set during the social and artistic upheavals of the last half century. Penetrating, provocative, funny, and deeply moving, Maintenance Artist fills a glaring cultural gap and heralds Ukeles’ call for a Maintenance Revolution.
Reviews
“Forty-six years after she embedded with the Sanitation Department, Ms. Ukeles’s populist convictions, her belief in the dignity of labor, her wariness of feminist art committed narrowly to liberating women from the male gaze speak with a power to the tensions between class and gender politics roiling the country right now.”
- The New York Times
“One of the most anticipated films of the 2025 Tribeca Festival. Riveting and long overdue.”
- Filmmaker Magazine
“A visually explosive portrait of a one-of-a-kind creative.”
- NBC New York
“Maintenance Artist explores the life and art of Mierle Laderman Ukeles, whose iconic works challenged both classism and art world conventions.”
- Cultured
“A fascinating look at an undeterred feminist and advocate for the working class who constantly defied such easy labels.”
- Documentary Magazine