Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Maintenance Art Performance Series (1973-74)

Mierle Laderman Ukeles, “Maintenance Art Performance Series”, 1973-74
Photograph of performance at the Wadsworth Atheneum.
Courtesy of the Ronald Feldman Gallery, New York.

This and many other works arose directly from Ukeles’s “Manifesto for Maintenance Art, 1969! Proposal for an Exhibition ‘Care’” a pdf of which is available through her gallery here. This text, written as a proposal for an exhibition, marked the naming of Maintenance Art, a word for Ukeles’s soon-to-emerge art practice after a frustrating period of trying to reconcile being both an artist and a mother.

As I wrote, with the artist’s close collaboration and consultation, in the catalogue for “WACK!: Art and the Feminist Revolution”:

Written in Philadelphia in October 1968 “in a near rage and at the same time with eerie calm, in one sitting” the manifesto calls for the integration of feminism, environmentalism, and labor activism with personal experience.”

- WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution (Los Angeles: The Museum of Contemporary Art; and Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2004), 311. (Quote from Ukeles, “25 Years Later,” Ukeles/Matrix 137, exhibition brochure published by Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticutt, 2002.)