Mierle Laderman Ukeles. Sanitation Celebrations: Grand Finale of the First NYC Art Parade, Part I: The Social Mirror, 1983; garbage collection truck, tempered glass mirror, and acrylic mirror; 28 x 8 x 10 1⁄2 ft. Created in collaboration with DSNY. Courtesy of the Artist.

Mierle Laderman Ukeles: Maintenance Art, at the Queens Museum (on view through February 2017), is the first museum survey devoted to the artist. Over the course of her five-decade-long career, most of which was spent as artist-in-residence with the City of New York Department of Sanitation, Ukeles mapped out a practice that seems to place her somewhere between the late-20th-century strategy of institutional critique and the current vogue for social-practice art. The former is one in which the artist carves out, no matter how provisionally, an outsider position from which to shine light on the biases and inequities institutions enact and reproduce. The latter involves a participatory, collaborative, socially engaged immersion into a field, usually undertaken with an activist intent. If neither of these labels seems quite the right fit for Ukeles, it is because she neither considered herself an outsider to the systems she was operating in nor an activist. Instead, her work, and the role of the artist that her work inscribed, makes a powerful argument for the artistic possibilities of citizenship—and the responsibilities, obligations, and collective pleasures that go along with it.

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Dawn Kasper. THIS COULD BE SOMETHING IF I LET IT, 2012; installation view, Whitney Biennial, 2012. Courtesy of the Artist and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

At some point, two years ago, maybe, I stopped doing things for free: no free writing, no free talks, no free critiques with artists or art students, nothing. I didn’t make the decision out of avarice; I made it as a matter of survival.

I used to accept all kinds of invitations to do such things, paid or not, when I was a tenured professor. I used to feel that it was sort of crass to think about my economic needs when there were important intellectual ideas to discuss. But, of course, the privilege of not having to think about my intellectual labor in those terms was predicated on the very fact that I was being paid, by my university, if not by the publishers, colleges, students, or artists who hosted the events to which I was invited.

When I decided to leave academia, things changed for me. It wasn’t just going from having my salary deposited in my bank account every two weeks to the feast-or-famine-but-mostly-famine pay schedule of a freelance writer. It was rather that, for the first time since I was a college student filling out a time card for a menial job, I was intensely aware of what my time was worth. And even more aware of what my time should be worth. Those two numbers were suddenly almost never the same.

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