“After the Revolution, who’s going to pick up the garbage on Monday morning?” challenged Mierle Laderman Ukeles. Crashing the boundary between art and action, in 1977 she became the first artist-in-residence at NYC’s Department of Sanitation, collaborating with municipal workers to inject art directly into the city’s bloodstream.

Maintenance Artist is the first feature documentary about this revolutionary public artist. Ukeles, inspired by Marcel Duchamp, pioneered the notion that routine maintenance – from changing diapers to picking up city trash to caring for the earth – could be acts of performance art. With never-before-seen archival footage, Maintenance Artists tells a story of essential workers and radical contemporary art set during the social and artistic upheavals of the last half century. Penetrating, provocative, funny, and deeply moving, Maintenance Artist fills a glaring cultural gap and heralds Ukeles’ call for a Maintenance Revolution.

Maintenance Artist opens at the IFC Center in Manhattan on April 22.

Meet the Filmmaker: the director, Toby Perl Freilich, will discuss her film with Nyack Public Arts Advisory Committee member Kris Burns.

Community Partners: Village of Nyack, Nyack Public Arts Advisory Committee

Toby Perl Feilich co-produced and co-directed MOYNIHAN, an L.A. Times Critic’s Pick, which was broadcast on American Masters in 2024, and directed, produced, and wrote the critically acclaimed INVENTING OUR LIFE: The Kibbutz Experiment. She co-produced and wrote SECRET LIVES: Hidden Children & Their Rescuers, for which she received an Emmy nomination for her writing, and co- produced Emmy-nominated RESISTANCE: Untold Stories of Jewish Partisans. She is a contributing writer to the magazines Tablet, The Jewish Review of Books, and The Forward, where she was awarded a 2007 Simon Rockower journalism Award.

As well as Chair of the Village of Nyack Public Arts Advisory Committee, Kristina Burns is the Event Director at Garner Historic District, Interim Program Director of GARNER Arts Center, and Creative Director of GARNER 25th Annual Arts Festival (May 16 and 17). She was the founding Director of Rivertown Film Society.