The San Francisco Art Institute is pleased to welcome New York City–based artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles as the inaugural Ann Chamberlain Distinguished Fellow in Interdisciplinary Studies.
A major intervention in feminist performance practices and public art, Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s 1969 manifesto Maintenance Art: Proposal for an Exhibition argues for the intimate relationship between creative production in the public sphere and domestic labor—a relationship whose intricacies and ramifications she has been unraveling, in one form or another, ever since. Starting in 1977, she became artist-in-residence (unsalaried) at the New York City Department of Sanitation, a position that enables her to introduce radical public art as public culture into a system serving and owned by the entire population. Recent permanent commissions include Percent-for-Art Freshkills Park Project in New York City (formerly the world’s largest municipal landfill), Danehy Park in Cambridge (Massachusetts, USA), and the Maine College of Art in Portland (Maine, USA). Current and recent temporary exhibitions include performances and installations at the Barbican Art Gallery in London, the Montalvo Arts Center in Saratoga (California), the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, Creative Time in New York City, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art in Tel Aviv (Israel), and the 2007 Sharjah Biennial in Sharjah (United Arab Emirates). She has completed six “work ballets” that involve workers, trucks, barges, and hundreds of tons of recyclables in cities across the globe. Laderman Ukeles is a Guggenheim Fellow and a recipient of many grants and fellowships from the NEA and the New York State Council on the Arts.
San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI)
800 Chestnut Street
San Francisco, CA 94133
800 345 SFAI / 415 749 4500
Monday, May 3 – Wednesday, May 5, 2010