Mierle Laderman Ukeles on
(Re)Imagining Freshkills Park
See how New York’s largest landfill is
being transformed into an urban oasis.
Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Paula Vilaplana de Miguel, Evangelos Kotsioris
Jul 14, 2023, MoMA magazine online
In 2001, the design office of James Corner Field Operations won the competition to transform Fresh Kills, New York’s largest landfill, into a park. The project’s first completed segment, which will allow the public access to this vast site, is scheduled to open later this year. Freshkills Park is one of 12 projects featured in the exhibition Architecture Now: New York, New Publics, on view at MoMA through July 29, 2023.
Among the materials included in the Freshkills Park display is a photograph of Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s landmark Social Mirror, an artwork comprising a sanitation truck covered in mirrored panels. Having worked as the artist-in-residence at the Department of Sanitation in New York since 1977, a role she initiated, Ukeles is closely linked to the creation of Freshkills Park. We recently spoke to the artist about her long-standing relationship with this contested site and two of the numerous art projects she has proposed for it since 1989.
—Evangelos Kotsioris and Paula Vilaplana de Miguel
Mierle Laderman Ukeles: I discovered Fresh Kills in the late 1970s, while working on an art project titled Touch Sanitation, which involved visiting every single sanitation district in New York, shaking hands with each of the 8,500 workers, and saying to each, “Thank you for keeping New York City alive.” Between 1979 and ’80, I was going to Staten Island often. I had been to all of the other landfills in the city. But when I went to Fresh Kills for the first time, I was stunned. The all-night unloading operation was remarkable: a continuous flow of garbage.
There were seven operating landfills at the time, and by 1985, the State Department of Environmental Conservation shut all of them down except for one in Queens, which was temporarily left open. After that was closed too, the only landfill that would receive waste—a big decision made by the city, because of its size—was Fresh Kills in Staten Island. Fresh Kills continued to operate until its closure in 2001. Following that, an exception had to be made for it to receive the debris of the World Trade Center. There were 300 people working 24 hours a day at Fresh Kills at that time. It was a very busy workplace with a constant stream of barges unloading waste 24/7, except for Christmas Day—only one day off a year, that’s it!
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