Maintenance Artist

Director Toby Perl Freilich expected to attend

You can be forgiven if the most famous artworks of Mierle Laderman Ukeles don’t immediately spring to mind—you won’t find them mass-produced in museum gift shops. But after seeing her decades of revolutionary artmaking unfold in this eye-opening profile, you will quickly find yourself in awe of Ukeles the person, as well as her quietly subversive art. For nearly sixty years—including as the longstanding artist-in-residence of New York City’s Department of Sanitation—her canvas has been the streets, landfills, and workplaces of New York, uplifting everyday acts of human service—cleaning, maintenance, housework—in collaborative projects that radically shift our view of the value of labor in society. The daughter of an Orthodox rabbi, Ukeles didn’t find her voice as an artist until the late 1960s, when, as a new mother, she realized that her avant-garde heroes—Duchamp, Rothko, Pollock—“didn’t change diapers.” Insisting on bringing artistic dignity to overlooked acts of caring, including motherhood and sanitation, she penned a feminist rejoinder—a “Maintenance Manifesto”—and embarked on her groundbreaking public art career, revealing the unseen systems of service underpinning modern life. —Peter Stein

2025 Filmmaker in Residence

California Premiere

Toby Perl Freilich is a director, producer, and writer whose work explores Jewish identity, history, and politics. She co-directed Moynihan, a documentary on Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan that premiered at Film Forum and aired on PBS’ American Masters in 2024. Her film Inventing Our Life: The Kibbutz Experiment was praised by The New York Times and NPR, while her Emmy-nominated Secret Lives: Hidden Children & Their Rescuers was named a top ten nonfiction film by Andrew Sarris. Freilich also co-produced the PBS documentary Resistance: Untold Stories of Jewish Partisans. She is a contributing writer to Tablet, Jewish Review of Books, Sh’ma, and the Forward, where she won a Simon Rockower Award for Excellence in Jewish Journalism.