“Mierle Does Not Fit Neatly Into Any Box”: Toby Perl Freilich Discusses Her Tribeca-Premiering ‘Maintenance Artist’ Starring Mierle Laderman Ukeles

It’s fitting that Mierle Laderman Ukeles is not a household name. The pioneering activist-artist has devoted her entire life and career to showcasing the behind-the-scenes labor—and laborers—crucial to any art project. By her way of thinking, manual labor in all its forms should be celebrated as an artistic endeavor. Toward the end of Toby Perl Freilich’s Maintenance Artist, its title a reference to Ukeles’s own as the one, and only, artist-in-residence at the New York City Department of Sanitation, Ukeles says: “art can manifest the agency of individual citizens.” Rich with archival imagery, Freilich’s Tribeca-debuting doc is comprised of interviews with the now octogenarian (and not-so-retired) Ukeles, alongside various academics and fans (including David Byrne). It’s a fascinating look at an undeterred feminist and advocate for the working class who constantly defied such easy labels. A conceptualist inspired by Marcel Duchamp, Ukeles is also a happily married Orthodox Jewish mother who declared in her 1969 Manifesto for Maintenance Art that the cleaning and caregiving that went into housekeeping and childrearing was itself a museum-worthy performance. As is the maintaining of communities as a whole, which led her to form what would become a decades-long artistic alliance with NYC’s often ignored and even derided sanitation workers in the 1970s. (Which in turn led to a backlash among certain feminist artists who wanted to keep that label male-free.) Just prior to the film’s documentary competition debut, Documentary caught up with Freilich (2010’s Inventing Our Life: The Kibbutz Experiment and 2018’s Moynihan, co-directed with Joseph Dorman) to learn how she ended up collaborating with this unconventional and unusually empathetic character, who urges us all to “cherish the work of taking care.” For ultimately, “We are all maintenance workers.”

To read my interview visit Documentary magazine.