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https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/14/nyregion/
maintenance-artist-mierle-laderman-ukeles.html

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Big CITY

The '70s Performance Artist Who Became a Hero to 'Garbage Men'

A new documentary explores the life and work of Mierle Laderman
Ukeles, who compared the indignities suffered by women to those
endured by sanitation workers, forced to clean up messes they didn't
make.

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A woman with long blond hair and a down vest talks to a sanitation
worker in front of a graffiti-covered garbage truck.
During her time with the department, Mierle Laderman Ukeles spoke
with each of the 8,500 sanitation workers. A documentary about her is
screening at the Tribeca Film Festival.Credit...Mierle Laderman
Ukeles, via Ronald Feldman Gallery, New York; Photo by Robin Holland
Ginia Bellafante

By Ginia Bellafante

Ginia Bellafante writes the Big City column, a weekly commentary on
the politics, culture and life of New York City.

June 14, 2025

The New York City Sanitation Department in the late 1970s was not an
obvious place to find a warm welcome for feminist conceptual art. But
the newly appointed sanitation commissioner, Norman Steisel, had
arrived as an outlier in the world of municipal waste. Before he
began his career in city government, first working in budget offices,
he had been a graduate student in chemical engineering and applied
mathematics at Yale, where he fell in with a crowd of M.F.A.
students. He understood the avant-garde "at least at a rudimentary
level," he told me recently, just as the art scene in SoHo was
exploding.

So when he was introduced to Mierle Laderman Ukeles -- who had an idea
for a project that would involve thousands of members of his work
force and an effort to radically alter the perception of garbage men,
as they were then known -- he was eager to hear what she had to say.

Second-wave feminism produced a roster of writers, artists and
intellectuals whose influence and celebrity has endured, but Ms.
Ukeles had never stood among them. Nine years ago, her profile rose
considerably when the Queens Museum made her the subject of a
comprehensive retrospective, her first. She was well into her 70s.

As it happened, Toby Perl Freilich, a filmmaker who had just finished
a documentary about Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, caught the
exhibit on its last day. Inspired by the artist's vision, Ms.
Freilich spent the subsequent years making her latest documentary,
"Maintenance Artist," which has been screening this week at the
Tribeca Film Festival.

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.

Image
Ms. Ukeles aimed to elevate the stature of "garbage men" at a time
when the public blamed them for the filth of New York City.Credit...
Mierle Laderman Ukeles, via Ronald Feldman Gallery, New York; Photo
by Marcia Bricker

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