Today from our friends at Guernica, we bring you an excerpt from a conversation between Jen Delos Reyes, J. Morgan Puett, and Mierle Laderman Ukeles. The former is the founder of Open Engagement, an annual conference “committed to examining how artists, institutions, and publics approach art and social practice”; the latter two are artists who work the everyday—including labors such as chores and childcare—into their practices. This interview was originally published on May 15, 2014.

Mierle Laderman Ukeles. Washing, Tracks, Maintenance–Outside, 1973; performance at Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut. Courtesy of the Artist and Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York.

Jen Delos Reyes: Was there a particular moment in your practice when you made a conscious decision to merge your life and your work as an artist?

J. Morgan Puett: The conscious decision was realized in graduate school. Once out of school, engaged in filming–dwelling–clothing–researching projects, I found that making clothes for people gave me great pleasure. Somewhere along that path I realized that was a way to survive as an artist. Although, in learning the industries, I forgot that pleasure for a time while struggling with capitalism. I thought of my work in the rag trade as a series of conceptual storefront projects; then later I created a long series of research projects and art installations for institutions that were about those (disturbing) experiences in the fashion industry. It was all extremely important to the development of the ideas and methods that permeate everything I do now.

Mierle Laderman Ukeles: I lusted for the freedoms expressed in the work of my art heroes: Jackson Pollock, Marcel Duchamp, Mark Rothko. I wanted that life of the autonomous artist, pushing into the unknown, creating the new. I struggled for many years. Then Jack Ukeles and I had a baby in 1968. My teacher in grad school, seeing my pregnant belly, said—despite my being his best student—“Well, I guess you can’t be an artist.” This gurgling baby was depending on my constant maintenance. I found that my art heroes didn’t change diapers. I tried to split my life in two: half the mother/maintenance worker, and half the artist. Why hadn’t my education prepared me for this? I was in a full crisis. Then, after one and a half years of twirling, an epiphany! If I am the boss of my freedom, if I have this power, then I call maintenance, art; I call necessity, freedom. I can collide these two poles, crash them together. In a quiet rage, in October 1969, I sat down and wrote the Manifesto for Maintenance Art, 1969! I named Maintenance as Art. Why? Because I say so. The artist must survive. It is art that must change.

Read the full interview here.