Mierle Laderman Ukeles

Over the past four decades, artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles has created public works and museum installations around the world that reveal our unlimited powers of transformation. Among the artists featured in the Work Ethic exhibition, Ukeles speaks today about her ongoing work. Mierle Laderman Ukeles' works have challenged the value placed on service work, restored ravaged landscapes, and investigated the continual rebirth of the individual through water immersion rituals. In this talk, she'll discuss works in which personal and urban service collide and human space and systems become art. Always provoking the boundaries between necessity and freedom, she shows that art grows everywhere and can transform any thing.

Since her 1969 Maintenance Art Manifesto, many of her projects have investigated concepts of maintenance and questioned the division between artistic and everyday work. She became an (unsalaried) artist in residence in New York City's Department of Sanitation in 1977, and her 25-year-long residency was named one of the greatest public art works of all time in the winter 2002-03 issue of Public Art Review. She continues to be the official artist of the Fresh Kills Landfill, the largest landfill in the world, in Staten Island, New York. She has received multiple awards from National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Andy Warhol Foundation, among other institutions, and is represented by Ronald Feldman Gallery in New York City.


support

Education season presented by Bank One.

All education programs presented with the support of the Corporate Annual Fund of the Wexner Center Foundation.