Maintenance Artist

After becoming a mother disrupted her career as an artist, Mierle Laderman Ukeles published a daring manifesto: from now on, all her acts of childcare and household maintenance would be performance art. The Manifesto propelled Ukeles into the 1960’s avant-garde, a largely male scene that prized the solitary creator but scorned those who “keep the dust off the pure individual creation.”

Recognizing that this devaluation of care was systemic, Ukeles began scaling up her maintenance revolution to include collaborations with the often invisible cleaners and guards who care for museums — poking at the concealed hierarchies embedded in the white cube space. In 1977, in a move that would radically reframe public art, Ukeles she was invited to establish an unprecedented artist-in-residency at the NYC Sanitation Department, where she championed a demeaned but essential class of workers within a vast urban system.

Set during the impassioned social and artistic upheavals of the late 20th century and using newly digitized archival footage, Maintenance Artist is the story of an artist who raised maintenance to an art form and became a force in contemporary art.

95 minutes

Hosted by WFMU DJ Trouble with Q&A to follow with Director Toby Perl Freilich

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TOBY PERL FREILICH: Director/Producer/Writer

Toby co-produced and co-directed MOYNIHAN, an L.A. Times Critic’s Pick, which was broadcast on PBS’ American Masters series in March 2024. She directed, produced, and wrote the critically acclaimed INVENTING OUR LIFE: The Kibbutz Experiment. Freilich co-produced and wrote Academy Award-winning director Aviva Slesin’s SECRET LIVES: Hidden Children & Their Rescuers, for which she received an Emmy nomination for her writing, and co-produced Emmy-nominated RESISTANCE: Untold Stories of Jewish Partisans. She is a contributing writer to the magazines Tablet, The Jewish Review of Books, and The Forward, where she was awarded a 2007 Simon Rockower journalism Award.

JUDITH MIZRACHY: Producer

Judith Mizrachy is a New York City-based producer whose films include the Academy Award-nominated documentary THE MARTHA MITCHELL EFFECT (2022), THE BOOKSELLERS (2020), and most recently UNCROPPED (2024). Her films have screened at festivals including Sundance, New York Film Festival, DOC NYC, Hot Docs and SXSW. Her work has been shown on big screens around the world including Lincoln Center, BAM, TIFF Bell Lightbox, Bertha DocHouse London, and on small screens via Netflix, The Criterion Channel, The New Yorker and more.

Host or Publisher WFMU