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The '70s Performance Artist Who Became a Hero to ‘Garbage Men'
The New York City Sanitation Department in the late 1970s was not an obvious place to find a warm welcome for feminist conceptual art. But the newly appointed sanitation commissioner, Norman Steisel, had arrived as an outlier in the world of municipal waste. Before he began his career in city government, first working in budget offices, he had been a graduate student in chemical engineering and applied mathematics at Yale, where he fell in with a crowd of M.F.A. students. He understood the avant-garde 'at least at a rudimentary level,' he told me recently, just as the art scene in SoHo was exploding.
So when he was introduced to Mierle Laderman Ukeles — who had an idea for a project that would involve thousands of members of his work force and an effort to radically alter the perception of garbage men, as they were then known — he was eager to hear what she had to say.
Second-wave feminism produced a roster of writers, artists and intellectuals whose influence and celebrity has endured, but Ms. Ukeles had never stood among them. Nine years ago, her profile rose considerably when the Queens Museum made her the subject of a comprehensive retrospective, her first. She was well into her 70s.
As it happened, Toby Perl Freilich, a filmmaker who had just finished a documentary about Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, caught the exhibit on its last day. Inspired by the artist's vision, Ms. Freilich spent the subsequent years making her latest documentary, 'Maintenance Artist,' which has been screening this week at the Tribeca Film Festival.
Forty-six years after she embedded with the Sanitation Department, Ms. Ukeles's populist convictions, her belief in the dignity of labor, her wariness of feminist art committed narrowly to liberating women from the male gaze speak with a power to the tensions between class and gender politics roiling the country right now.
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