Mierle Laderman Ukeles

 
The work of Mierle Laderman Ukeles (born 1939 in Denver, Colorado) concerns the everyday routines of life. In 1969, following the birth of her first child, Ukeles wrote her Manifesto for Maintenance Art as a challenge to the oppositions between art and life, nature and culture, and public and private. Her work looked to highlight otherwise overlooked aspects of social production and questions, still very relevant today, the hierarchies of different forms of work, especially of housework and low-wage labour. Ukeles was interested in how artists could use the concept of transference to empower people to act as agents of change and stimulate positive community involvement toward ecological sustainability. Since 1977, Ukeles has acted as artist in residence at the New York City Department of Sanitation and realised radical public art as public culture in a system which serves and is owned by the entire population.
 
Mierle Laderman Ukeles - Seven Work Ballets
2016
English edition
Sternberg Press - Monographs and artists' books
sold out
Through archival research, this first monographic publication focuses on Ukeles's work ballets—a series of seven grand-scale collaborative performances involving workers, trucks, barges, and hundreds of tons of recyclables and steel—which took place between 1983 and 2012 in New York, Pittsburgh, Givors, Rotterdam, and Tokamachi.


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