Mierle Laderman Ukeles

September 27, 1983
Madison Avenue between 72nd and 104th streets

In 1977, Mierle Laderman Ukeles began interviewing New York City sanitation workers and in 1979 she began Touch Sanitation Performance. This multivalenced work included Handshake and Thanking Ritual, in which the artist shook hands and personally thanked each of the city’s 8,500 sanitation workers over an eleven-month period, and Follow in Your Footsteps, where Ukeles, working eight- to sixteen-hour shifts, followed sanitation workers on their routes in every district throughout the city and mirrored their motions as a street dance. In Cleansing The Bad Names, public officials ceremoniously removed windows that had been graffitied with slurs for sanitation workers (i.e. “garbagemen”). Ukeles felt that if sanitation workers are garbagemen, the public is therefore garbagepersons.

Ukeles believed that “art should impinge on the daily life of everyone and should be injected into daily prime-time work-time,” and that people are “ready for the kind of public art that uses the entire city as a performance space.” In 1983, Creative Time joined the effort by presenting Ukeles’s Sanitation Celebrations in three movements, featuring “Social Mirror”; “Ballet Mechanique for Six Mechanical Sweepers”; and “Ceremonial Sweep,” in which the Sanitation Commissioner, two union presidents, the entire Sanitation Executive Committee, and art-world figures handswept thirty-two blocks along Madison Avenue. The project was presented in partnership with the New York City Department of Sanitation, the First New York City Art Parade, and the Uniformed Sanitationmen’s Association.