Mierle Laderman Ukeles penned her Manifesto for Maintenance Art overnight, in a cold fury. It was 1969; she had given birth to her first child the year before. Ukeles no longer knew how to respond to the question, regularly asked by other artists, of what she was “working on.” Constantly occupied with tasks, she had no obvious product to corroborate her labor (a clean kitchen? a robust baby?), so in a singularly radical gesture, Ukeles invented “Maintenance Art.” In doing so, she posed entirely new questions about art. What if taking out the dirty diapers and washing the dishes were themselves considered serious and meaningful work? What if boredom and repetition were content worthy of exploration? What if we understood sanitation work—much like housewifery—as being virtuosic, skilled, and full of its own distinct choreography? What if the most interesting work to be made had no tangible results, and were about keeping other people alive?

Ukeles has been making work for almost fifty years. She washed the steps of the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, photographed pregnant women cleaning chickens, and shook the hand of every maintenance worker in New York City. Over the length of her career, she has created installations and performances that contend with rehearsal, repetition, invisibility, perpetuation, and productive undoing, all strategies that might be considered “practice” within current art jargon.