The Best Art of 2016

Holland Cotter of The New York Times has listed WEAD artist ‘Mierle Laderman Ukeles: Maintenance Art’ among the Best Art of 2016

 

“MIERLE LADERMAN UKELES: MAINTENANCE ART

‘After the revolution, who’s going to pick up the garbage on Monday morning?’ That’s what Ms. Ukeles asked herself in the 1960s, when, fed up with an art world that put painting on a pedestal and shut women out, she began making art from stuff that most people threw away. She is now into her fourth decade as honorary artist in residence with New York Department of Sanitation. Her retrospective at the Queens Museum is a tribute to a career that has consistently looked at what’s overlooked, including the environmental crisis. So there are saints after all.” 

     -Holland Cotter, from “The Best Art of 2016.” NYTimes.com, December 7th, 2016.

To read the full article online click here.  This article appeared in print on Sunday, December 11th.

This is the fourth write-up the exhibition has received from leading art critic Holland Cotter and it’s seventh appearance in The New York Times. ‘Maintenance Art’ was first reviewed by Cotter on the front page of the Friday arts section, September 16th, 2016:

“Full and exemplary retrospectives of major but underknown American artists are rare. The Queens Museum has such a show in ‘Mierle Laderman Ukeles: Maintenance Art’…
Care, repair and preservation are what Ms. Ukeles’s art has been about right along. It’s as if her early realization that selfempowerment comes not through fighting but through redefining the meaning of power had given her a usable awareness of vulnerability in the world. That awareness has taken her, in ways extremely rare in contemporary art, through potential barriers of class and gender; it has given her an enviable ease with spirituality (her Jewish faith is central to her life); and it has let her produce work that’s as companionable as a shared meal and as serious as art can be.”

     -Holland Cotter, from “An Artist Redefines Power. With Sanitation Equipment.” The New York Times, September 16th, 2016. 

To read the full review online click here.