Maintenance Artist (2025)

Directed by Toby Perl Freilich

With Mierle Ukeles

Not Rated, 90 minutes

In English and Japanese with English subtitles

Reception to follow the screening!

"After the Revolution, who's going to pick up the garbage on Monday morning?" challenged Mierle Laderman Ukeles. Crashing the boundary between art and action, in 1977 she became the first artist-in-residence at NYC's Department of Sanitation, collaborating with municipal workers to inject art directly into the city's bloodstream. "Maintenance Artist" is the first feature documentary about this revolutionary public artist. 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.