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    ‘Maintenance Artist’ Highlights Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ Radical, Caring Approach to Public Art

    “Touch Sanitation Performance” (1979-80).
    Photo by Robin Holland, © Mierle Laderman Ukeles, courtesy the artist and Ronald Feldman Gallery, NY, shared with permission

    ‘Maintenance Artist’ Highlights Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ Radical, Caring Approach to Public Art

    June 5, 2025

    ArtFilmSocial Issues

    Kate Mothes

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    We don’t typically associate city government and public works departments with conceptual artwork, let alone lasting collaborations. But for New York City artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles, who has been artist-in-residence at the city’s Department of Sanitation since 1977, her core creative inquiry centers around a radical shift in how we perceive art, who gets to experience it, and spotlighting the labor that happens “behind the scenes” to keep society running.

    The focus of a new documentary, Maintenance Artist, which premieres this weekend at the Tribeca Film Festival, Ukeles’ remarkable approach to art-making centers ideas of upkeep and nurturing. In 1969, she published “MANIFESTO FOR MAINTENANCE ART, 1969!,” a proposal for an exhibition titled CARE, in which she outlined parallels between her experiences as an artist and mother with those of sanitation workers. She asks, “…after the revolution, who’s going to pick up the garbage on Monday morning?”

    In the early 1970s, Ukeles performed a number of interventions drawing attention to labor and tasks that often go unnoticed in daily life, like “Washing / Tracks / Maintenance: Outside” (1973) and “Washing” (1974), the latter of which was staged outside of a former gallery in Soho. From 2 to 5 p.m. one June afternoon, she proclaimed that the area outside the front door was to be maintained as art, “normalized” again at 5:01 p.m. In a 1986 documentary short titled “Not Just Garbage,” she describes this early performance:

    I started to occupy the area through this sort of repetition of maintenance, of cleaning, and people watched me and were afraid to enter the space. When someone would enter, or go into the gallery and walk across, I would wipe out their tracks immediately. I would follow them on my hands and my knees and wipe out their tracks right up to their heels.

    In 1977, Ukeles was officially named the Department of Sanitation’s artist-in-residence, and her studio has occupied an office space within its building for decades. Maintenance Artist opens with historical footage of Ukeles introducing herself to sanitation workers as she began her more-than-four-decade tenure. The film then cuts to the artist and her studio manager, Catie J. Heitz, sifting through Ukeles’ archives to select work to send to the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art.

    “Mierle is not a very typical artist,” Heitz says. “She works within systems, with people. Sometimes you can’t see the work because it was performance—it was an ephemeral thing—but what you can see now is the paperwork that represents it.”

    “Touch Sanitation Performance” (1980). Photo by Marcia Bricker, © Mierle Laderman Ukeles, courtesy the artist and Ronald Feldman Gallery, NY

    Ukeles’ work aims to illuminate the labor—and laborers—who play an immanently crucial role in keeping the city functioning on a daily basis, even though work like trash collection or street-cleaning is rarely noticed or lauded. “I desire to create a new kind of utterly public art, not in sealed-off, special places for the few, but art injected right into the city’s bloodstream of daily working life,” she said in an early statement.

    Ukeles “has created art that deals with the endless maintenance and service work that ‘keeps the city alive’ — urban waste flows, recycling, ecology, urban sustainability, and our power to transform degraded land and water into healthy inhabitable public places,” Ronald Feldman Gallery says, which represents the artist. “Ukeles asks whether we can design modes of survival—for a thriving planet, not an entropic one—that don’t crush our personal and civic freedom and silence the individual’s voice.”

    The first piece Ukeles completed in her DSNY residency was a durational performance titled “Touch Sanitation Performance,” in which she shook the hand of every sanitation employee—all 8,500 of them—and said to each one, “Thank you for keeping New York City alive.” That gratitude proved profound in some cases, as the interaction had lasting positive effects for some of the workers, who expressed how they had been harassed or humiliated while on the job in the past.

    “The Social Mirror” (1983), New York City 20 cubic yard Department of Sanitation garbage collection truck covered in glass mirror and acrylic mirror, created in collaboration with the New York City Department of Sanitation. Image © Mierle Laderman Ukeles, courtesy the artist and Ronald Feldman Gallery, New York

    Several of Ukeles’ works transformed the fleet of New York City trucks and equipment into moving artworks. “The Social Mirror” (1983) covered a garbage truck in a giant reflective glass surface, mirroring denizens of the city back at themselves. “Snow Workers Ballet” (2012) coordinated hulking machinery into a choreographed performance, positioning hard graft in the limelight through the unlikely merging of industrial vehicles and elegance.

    The Queens Museum was the first to present a major survey of Ukeles’ work in 2017, spanning five decades of her interrogations of feminism, freedom, crisis, and care. Beyond the conceptual or performative, Ukeles’ practice has always been social and community-oriented, prompting us to genuinely consider how we treat one another, recognize hard work, and, of course, define what art can be.

    Maintenance Artist is directed, written, and produced by Toby Perl Freilich in collaboration with writer Anne Alvergue, premiering on June 8 with additional screenings through June 14 in New York. Learn more on the film’s website.

    “Washing / Tracks / Maintenance: Outside” (1973), performance at Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT. Photo © Mierle Laderman Ukeles, courtesy the artist and Ronald Feldman Gallery, NY

    Mierle Laderman Ukeles, “The Social Mirror” (1983), installed at the Queens Museum in 2016. Photo by Hai Zhang, courtesy of ‘Maintenance Artist’

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    Discarded Packaging and Labels Find New Life in Kelly Kozma’s Vibrant Patchworks

    “Magma & Reef” (2025). All images courtesy of Kelly Kozma and Paradigm Gallery + Studio, shared with permission

    Discarded Packaging and Labels Find New Life in Kelly Kozma’s Vibrant Patchworks

    May 2, 2025

    Art

    Kate Mothes

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    From dozens of Chiquita banana labels to toothpaste packaging to color-coded quality control stickers, Kelly Kozma finds beauty in everyday ephemera. “Piece by piece, she saves any colorful or textured box that she encounters, even though most are expected to be discarded after their original use,” says Paradigm Gallery + Studio, which opens the artist’s solo exhibition Watch Me Backflip this weekend.

    Kozma takes an archival and interdisciplinary approach to working with numerous found materials, combining a variety of media into two-dimensional wall works, expansive textile-inspired assemblages, and voluminous suspended installations. “Watch Me Backflip embraces ideas of reusing material, interconnectedness, and the significance of the smallest interaction on a much larger environment,” says an exhibition statement.

    Installation view of ‘Watch Me Backflip’ at Paradigm Gallery + Studio

    “Iguana & Myrrh” and “Magma & Reef” mark the largest compositions Kozma has created. The former spans 22 feet in circumference and comprises more than 30,000 hand-stitched circles cut from a wide variety of greeting cards, found packaging, and other colorful materials. Committed to a minimal-waste practice, the artist incorporates scraps and loose threads into a number of accompanying works in Watch Me Backflip.

    “As she stitches these lovingly collected pieces, Kozma creates connections between the people in her life and the objects she interacts with, inspiring mindfulness against overconsumption and emotional apathy,” the gallery says.

    Watch Me Backflip opens today and continues through June 1 in Philadelphia. See more on the artist’s Instagram.

    “I See Your Beauty” (2025), process control patches and acrylic on panel

    Installation view of ‘Watch Me Backflip’ at Paradigm Gallery + Studio

    Detail of “Iguana & Myrrh”

    Installation view of ‘Watch Me Backflip’ at Paradigm Gallery + Studio

    “Peels So Good” (2025), banana stickers and acrylic on panel

    Detail of “Iguana & Myrrh”

    The artist working on the installation of “Magma & Reef”

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    Mandy Barker’s Cyanotypes Revive a Pioneering Botanist’s Book to Warn About Synthetic Debris

    Jersey boxers (Gigartina sunday). All images from ‘Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Imperfections’ by Mandy Barker, published by GOST Books. All images © Mandy Barker, courtesy of the author and GOST, shared with permission

    Mandy Barker’s Cyanotypes Revive a Pioneering Botanist’s Book to Warn About Synthetic Debris

    March 18, 2025

    ArtBooksClimateNatureScience

    Kate Mothes

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    “In 2012, I found a piece of material in a rock pool that changed my life,” artist Mandy Barker says. “Mistaking this moving piece of cloth for seaweed started the recovery of synthetic clothing from around the coastline of Britain for the next ten years.”

    Barker is known for her photographic practice that takes a deep dive into marine debris. Her work has been featured in publications like National Geographic, The Guardian, VOGUE, and many more. Often collaborating with scientists to raise awareness about plastic pollution in the earth’s oceans, she eloquently highlights its harmful impacts on marine habitats, wildlife, and all of us who depend on the ocean for sustenance.

    Patterned blouse (Laminaria materia)

    Forthcoming from GOST Books, Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Imperfections surveys the unexpected and out-of-place along British shores. At first glance, each specimen appears like a fragment of a leaf or a scatter of organic material, but upon closer inspection, the subjects of Barker’s images reveal details of unraveled polyester or scraps of nylon tights.

    Barker hopes to raise awareness of the damaging effects of fast fashion, synthetic clothing, and the increasing amounts of microfibers in the oceans. The fashion industry is responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions than all international flights and container ships combined and is also the second-largest consumer of water, requiring about 2,000 gallons of water to produce a single pair of jeans.

    Barker’s new book is composed as an homage to the work of trailblazing botanist and photographer Anna Atkins (1799-1871), who is thought to be the first woman to take a photograph and the first person to publish a book containing photographic illustrations. Her 1843 study, Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions, employed blue photograms to illustrate photosynthetic organisms and seaweeds.

    Barker’s work serves as a kind of sibling or sequel to Atkins’ pioneering publication, presented in a similar style with handwritten names in Latin beneath each specimen.

    Coat lining (Dichloria vestis)

    In their updated versions, the titles take Atkins’ scientific names as a starting point and tweak them just slightly to conjure references to clothing or the human body. In the plate titled “Dichloris vestis,” for example, Barker draws on a real type of algae Atkins catalogued, Dichloria viridis, but “vestis” is instead a tongue-in-cheek reference to outerwear, often made of polyester or other synthetic materials. “Conferva tibia,” which portrays frayed tights, employs the Latin word for “leg.”

    From John o’ Groats at the northernmost tip of Great Britain to Land’s End at its southernmost, Barker recovered specimens of clothing from more than 120 beaches. Her finds, ranging from parkas to wigs to sports jerseys, were pulled from the sand, tide pools, or directly from the sea. In Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Imperfections, Barker looks to the past to better understand how our actions in the present have both immediate impacts and will shape the future of the climate crisis.

    Find your copy on GOST’s online store, where signed editions are also available, and explore more of Barker’s work on her website and Instagram.

    Nylon tights (Conferva tibia)

    Shawl (Odonthalia amiculum), shown on a spread from ‘Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Imperfections’ by Mandy Barker

    Jacket lining (Rhodomenia ignotus)

    Fishnet tights (Chylocladia funda)

    Two Blouses (Asperococcus indusium)

    Synthetic fur hood (Myrionema Palliolum)

    Lining (with algae) (Grateloupia intra)

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    Endless Fields of Detritus Blanket Cássio Vasconcellos’s Aerial Composites

    Detail of “Air Force.” All images courtesy of Cássio Vasconcellos and Nara Roesler Gallery, shared with permission

    Endless Fields of Detritus Blanket Cássio Vasconcellos’s Aerial Composites

    November 12, 2024

    ArtClimatePhotography

    Kate Mothes

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    Where do jets go when they no longer fly? What happens to shipping containers when they aren’t useful anymore for cargo? The answer is invisible to most of us, but for Cássio Vasconcellos, abandoned trains, planes, and automobiles are far from forgotten.

    For more than four decades, the São Paolo-based artist has been fascinated by the relationship between humans and the landscape. Over the years, his work has captured dramatic impressions of sprawling cities around the globe, often from the air, spurring an ongoing series called Collectives that condenses details of urban infrastructure like highways and parking lots into sprawling, all-over compositions.

    “Collective 11: Airplanes”

    Collectives 2, to which these images belong, focuses solely on the mesmerizing—and mind-boggling—quantity of scrapped vehicles and metal indefinitely parked in nondescript places. Vasconcellos draws from tens of thousands of aerial photographs he has made of junkyards, scrap heaps, airplane graveyards, and dumps to create remarkable, large-scale composite images.

    The artist has mapped all of the junkyards around São Paolo, plus numerous more near the Brazilian cities of Cubatão, Santos, and Rio de Janeiro. He has also documented desert landscapes in the U.S. that serve as final resting places for commercial airliners and military jets.

    “Over,” for example, considers numerous associated meanings, like “overview,” “all-over,” “overdose,” or “game over.” The title references not only excess but the overflow of visual information in contemporary society.

    “Seeing an image like this is to make clear that there is no ‘throw away,’” Vasconcellos says in a video about “OVER,” which took him about a year and three months to complete. “This volume of things that are in the work… they are out there,” he adds. “I just put them together.”

    Detail of “Over”

    “These photos may look like post-apocalyptic scenarios, but they could be our future,” the artist says in a statement. “We still have to learn that by throwing things away and taking them out of our sight, we don’t make themdisappear. In fact, they keep existing somewhere else, outliving us mostof the time.”

    Vasconcellos cuts out individual shipping containers, trucks, dumpsters, and piles of detritus in a meticulous and time-consuming digital process. He never repeats an element in a composition, and each piece is scaled and situated so that the shadows align with the directionality of the light. He then adds dust and dirt to the surfaces, simultaneously emphasizing the patina of time and an eerie sense of timelessness.

    Devoid of people, Vasconcellos’s images nevertheless describe the human predilection to produce, consume, and cast aside. “It’s kind of nonsense, because there are some paths, but you don’t really understand how a person or a car can get in there—or get out,” Vasconcellos says. “It is a possible world, but at the same time, an absurd one.”

    Vasconcellos is represented by Nara Roesler Gallery, and you can explore more of his work on his website and Instagram.

    “Collective 12: Boats”

    “Collective 10: Containers”

    “Air Force”

    “Collective 7: Metal Scrap”

    Detail of “Collective 7: Metal Scrap”

    “Collective 9: Scrap Dumpster”

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    Thriving Habitats by Stéphanie Kilgast Emerge from Plastic Bottles and Recycled Objects

    “Fitting In (Decorator Crab)” (2024), mixed media on thrifted jewelry box, 8 x 6.75 x 7 inches. All images courtesy of Arch Enemy Arts, shared with permission

    Thriving Habitats by Stéphanie Kilgast Emerge from Plastic Bottles and Recycled Objects

    October 23, 2024

    ArtClimate

    Kate Mothes

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    From crunched, single-use containers to thrifted boxes and repurposed clocks, Stéphanie Kilgast (previously) devises unique habitats for a wide range of creatures. Fungi takes root along the sides of a green bottle as a beetle crawls over the cap in “Weevil Wander,” for example, and a violet owl alights on the top of a pair of binoculars.

    Kilgast’s solo exhibition, LUSCIOUS LEGACY at Arch Enemy Arts, continues the artist’s interest in highlighting the human impact on the environment and the increasingly grim consequences of the climate crisis. Rather than focusing on the darker reality, she adopts an optimistic view of nature’s resilience.

    “Weevil Wander” (2024), mixed media on plastic bottle, 6 x 5 x 7.75 inches

    “My work touches very contrasting emotions: the joy of color and natural beauty but also the sadness and despair of where we are headed,” Kilgast says. She hopes to aid us in questioning mass consumerism and its resulting trash, which continues to threaten delicate ecosystems worldwide, and adds, “The world is beautiful. It is worth fighting for.”

    LUSCIOUS LEGACY runs through October 27 in Philadelphia. Find more on the artist’s website and Instagram.

    “Chi Va Piano” (2024), mixed media on reclaimed clock, 6 x 3 x 4.25 inches

    Detail of “Chi Va Piano”

    “Stare (Eurasian Eagle Owl)” (2024), mixed media on reclaimed binoculars, 3.5 x 5 x 9.75 inches

    Detail of “Weevil Wanderer”

    “Glacier” (2024), mixed media on plastic bottle, 4 x 4.25 x 8.75 inches

    “Bloom” (2024), mixed media on plastic bottle, 6.75 x 7.75 x 9.75 inches

    “Luscious Legacy” (2024), mixed media on milk carton, 7.75 x 3 x 8.75 inches

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    A Short Documentary Explores the Life of the ‘Artifact Artist’ Who’s Been Excavating New York City’s Trash for Decades

    
    Art
    Documentary
    History

    #found objects
    #new york city
    #trash
    #upcycling
    #video

    April 19, 2021
    Grace Ebert

    Jordan in his home
    Descending into old privies, scouring landfills, and sneaking onto construction sites in the middle of the night are habitual activities for urban archaeologist Scott Jordan. For nearly five decades, he’s been excavating the trash and forgotten artifacts buried deep underneath New York City’s residential areas and fast-growing developments. His findings are diverse and revealing of the area’s past, offering a glimpse into the consumption habits and lifestyles of previous generations that date back to the 18th Century.
    A new documentary produced by Kaleidoscope Pictures chronicles Jordan’s lifelong practice that involves digging and uncovering items that he then transforms into new artworks. Dubbed “The Artifact Artist,” the short film by the same name follows the archaeologist and historian as he pulls glass bottles, Civil War-era garments, and small toys from the earth. While Jordan cleans and restores much of the pottery and well-preserved items, he utilizes the rest to create jewelry and assembled, sculptural works that nestle into shadowboxes, which he then sells at flea markets.
    Watch the full documentary below, and find more information on Jordan’s site, Things Found NYC, which he runs with Belle Costes. Shop the pair’s findings on Etsy. (via Kottke)

    
    Jordan digging in New York City
    Jordan in his home
    A collection of Jordan’s artworks made from items he found
    Jordan in his home
    Items in Jordan’s collection

    #found objects
    #new york city
    #trash
    #upcycling
    #video

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