Mierle Laderman Ukeles (born 1939) is a New York City-based artist known for her feminist and service-oriented artworks, which relate the idea of process in conceptual art to domestic and civic "maintenance".
Maintenance, for Ukeles, includes the household activities that keep things going, such as cooking, cleaning and child-rearing.
Her exhibitions and performances were intended to bring awareness to the low social status of maintenance work, generally paying either minimum wage or no payments for housewives and workers.
[11][13][14] Several of her performances in the 1970s involved the maintenance of art spaces, including the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford.
At the Wadsworth Atheneum, Ukeles cleaned the steps of the museum's entrance, as part of the 1973 all-female exhibition c.7500, curated by Lucy Lippard.
[16] In 2019, she received the Francis J. Greenburger Award for artists whom the art world knows to be of extraordinary merit but who have not been fully recognized by the public.
Ukeles invited New Yorkers from all five boroughs to contribute palm-sized artworks made of trash.
[18] In 2020, Mierle Laderman Ukeles unveiled a new artwork entitled For ⟶ forever....[19] The work, a 15-second video piece, was put on display on Time Square billboards, the Queens Museum's facade, and on New York's subway screens and showed: The role of the artist for Ukeles is that of an activist: empowering people to act and change societal values and norms.
This agenda stems from a feminist concern with challenging the privileged and gendered notion of the independent artist.
[21] The gargantuan domestic actions that she performed primarily became inaugurated out of her role as artist and mother in the 70s.
(Random order) I do a hell of a lot of washing, cleaning, cooking, renewing, supporting, preserving, etc.