Mierle Laderman Ukeles

I make utterly public art to transform the environment, urban infrastructure, and stigmas around service and dirt; often injected into and coming out of public systems; to enlarge concepts of circularity in time and material flows.

For simplicity, my work can be divided into three categories, permanent works, temporary installations, and public performances/work ballets. My scale is big. i want to make public interventions which inject maintenance work as the environmental core of culture. I believe that the design of garbage- recycling facilities, landfills, water treatment plants, rivers- should become the great public design of our age. They will be utterly ambitious our civic cathedrals. For if we are to survive, they will be our symbols of survival.