Maintenance Artist

Opens Wednesday, April 22, 2026

Please note that there are additional showtimes of MAINTENANCE ARTIST that screen with open captions (on-screen display of dialogue and sounds). For those showtimes,click here.

“After the Revolution, who’s going to pick up the garbage?”

Maintenance Artist is the first feature documentary about Mierle Laderman Ukeles, the New York City Sanitation Department’s official artist-in-residence.

After she became a mother, Mierle Laderman Ukeles published a daring manifesto declaring all her acts of household maintenance, including childcare, to be performance art. As she blasted her way into the largely male 1960s avant-garde, Ukeles began to scale up her “maintenance revolution,” collaborating with the invisible class of workers who maintain museums and galleries. In 1977 she radically reframed public art by becoming the first artist-in-residence at NYC’s Sanitation Department. Maintenance Artist tells the story of an unsalaried public artist who raised maintenance to an art form and became a revolutionary force in contemporary art.

• Country USA
• Running Time 95 minutes
• Director Toby Perl Freilich
• Cast Mierle Laderman Ukeles
• Accessibility Assistive Listening, T-Coil, Closed Captioning

IFC Center does not generally provide advisories about subject matter or potentially triggering content in films, as sensitivities vary from person to person. In addition to the synopses, trailers and other links on our website, further information about content and age-appropriateness for specific films can be found on Common Sense Media, IMDb and DoesTheDogDie.com as well as through general internet searches.