Mierle Laderman Ukeles:
MAINTENANCE ARTIST
Online Documentary Screening and Q&A
Thursday, January 15 Timebuddy
United States: 9am HST, 11am PST, Noon MST, 1pm CST, 2pm EST
Europe: 19:00 GMT, 20:00 CET Australia: Friday, January 16, 6:00am AEDT
Q&A with curators Patricia Phillips and Tom Finkelpearl, and director Toby Perl Freilich
After the Revolution, who’s going to pick up the garbage?
MAINTENANCE ARTIST is the first feature documentary about groundbreaking public artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles, the New York City Sanitation Department’s artist-in-residence.
ONLINE SCREENING COMING SOON
(link will be provided in confirmation email following registration)
header photo credit: Marcia Bricker
Guest Speakers
Toby Perl Freilich produced and directed Maintenance Artist, which premiered at the 2025 Tribeca Film Festival and has had special screenings at the National Gallery of Art and the Museums of Fine Arts in Houston and Boston. She co-produced and co-directed Moynihan, broadcast in 2024 on PBS’ American Masters series. Freilich directed and produced Inventing Our Life: The Kibbutz Experiment, hailed by the NY Times as “fascinating” and by NPR as “excellent.” She co-produced and wrote Secret Lives: Hidden Children and Their Rescuers, selected by Andrew Sarris as one of the ten best non-fiction films of 2003. Freilich was nominated for a news and documentary Emmy for Writing, and Secret Lives was nominated in the category of Outstanding Historical Programming. Perl Freilich also co-produced the Emmy-nominated Resistance: Untold Stories of Jewish Partisans that was broadcast nationally on PBS. She was a 2025 Jewish Film Institute resident and is a contributing writer to the magazines Tablet, the Jewish Review of Books and the Forward.
Tom Finkelpearl organized fifteen shows at PS1 in the 1980s, managed over 100 public art commissions at New York City's Department of Cultural Affairs (DCLA) in the 1990s, spearheaded a 50,000 square foot expansion as Director of the Queens Museum (2002-2014), and oversaw the city’s cultural policy and funding when he returned to DCLA as Commissioner (2014-2020). Since then, he has been a consultant for the Mellon Foundation (2020-21),and was appointed Social Practice Teaching Scholar in Residence at SP CUNY (2023-present). He co-curated a show of Christine Sun Kim’s work at the Whitney Museum of American Art (2025) and Walker Art Center (2026). Currently he is working on his third book, Recast the Museum (working title) in collaboration with the artist Pablo Helguera. He has worked on projects with Mierle Laderman Ukeles in New York, Los Angeles, Givors, France and Niigata, Japan.
Patricia C. Phillips is a writer, editor, curator, and academic leader whose independent and collaborative work frequently focuses on public art, architecture, landscape, environmental conditions, and their dynamic intersection. In addition to these areas of research and focus, she has held significant academic appointments at Parsons School of Design / TheNew School, State University of New York at New Paltz, Cornell University / College of Architecture, Art, and Planning, Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), and Moore College of Art and Design. From 2002-2007, she served as Editor-in-Chief of Art Journal, a College Art Association (CAA) peer-reviewed quarterly. Following years in higher education and future-facing leadership, she currently focuses on critical writing and curatorial initiatives on urgent issues of the public realm including climate change -- vulnerability and volatility --environmental crises, contaminated, at risk sites, and (at this time) the creative and critical roles of artists as witnesses, collaborators, communicators, and catalysts. Her work seeks to summon investigation, communication, engagement, and remediation. She was Guest Curator of "Mierle Laderman Ukeles: Maintenance Art" at the Queens Museum and a contributor/writer to the book MIERLE LADERMAN UKELES: Maintenance Art book (Del Monico*Prestel).
Cost is $10 per person for screening the documentary (paid separately through screening website). Screening will be available one week prior to Q&A. Q&A is free for members and $5 for non-members. All participants MUST REGISTER.
