Mierle Laderman Ukeles (born 1939) is a New York City-based artist known for her feminist and service-oriented artworks, which relate the idea of process in conceptual art to domestic and civic "maintenance". She has been the Artist-in-Residence at the New York City Department of Sanitation. Her art brings to life the very essence of any urban center: waste flows, recycling, sustainability, environment, people, and ecology. Personal life and education Born in Denver, Colorado, Ukeles is Jewish and the daughter of a rabbi. As an undergraduate, Ukeles studied history and international studies at Barnard College and later began her artistic training at the Pratt Institute in New York in 1962. Her time at the Pratt Institute came with controversy, as her artworks (bulbous-like sculptures at the time) were deemed "over-sexed". While one of her teachers, Robert Richenburg, resigned in protest, she left the school shortly after. She then enrolled in art education at the University of Denver. She married in 1966. Two years later she had her first of three children. Ukeles earned a Master's degree from New York University in 1974 in Inter-related Arts. Career In 1969, Ukeles wrote a manifesto entitled Maintenance Art Manifesto 1969! Proposal for an exhibition "CARE", as she pondered her position as an artist and mother. Her claim was to challenge the domestic role of women by reframing herself as a "maintenance artist". Maintenance, for Ukeles, includes the household activities that keep things going, such as cooking, cleaning and child-rearing. Aside from "personal" or household maintenance, the manifesto also addressed "general" or public maintenance (cleaning a building, or a street) and earth maintenance, such as addressing polluted waters. Her exhibitions and performances were intended to bring awareness to the low social status of maintenance work, generally paying either minimum wage or no payments for housewives and workers. During her exhibitions, she performed the same tasks that she would perform in her daily life, including entertaining guests or partaking in a Mikveh. Several of her performances in the 1970s involved the maintenance of art spaces, including the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford. At the Wadsworth Atheneum, Ukeles cleaned the steps of the museum's entrance, as part of the 1973 all-female exhibition c.7500, curated by Lucy Lippard. Since 1977, she has been the Artist in Residence (unsalaried) of the New York City Department of Sanitation. She is the only artist to ever hold that position. In 2019, she