Mierle Laderman Ukeles will discuss her work in conjunction with WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution:

Thursday, June 7
6:30pm
THE GEFFEN CONTEMPORARY AT MOCA

After child-birth in 1968, Ukeles became a mother/maintenance worker and fell out of the picture of the avant-garde. In a rage, she wrote the Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969, applied equally to the home, all kinds of service work, the urban environment, and the sustenance of the earth itself. She viewed the Manifesto as “a world vision and a call for revolution for the workers of survival who could, if organized, reshape the world.”

Inspired, also, by NYC’s “Comprehensive Plan” that split its mission into two systems: development and maintenance, she has created works that collide the boundaries of these two systems together, understanding them as the embodiment of opposing human drives of freedom and necessity. Her works seek to test, provoke, expand and even explode these boundaries: always raising the question “Is this work necessary?” and then asking, “What does this work do to one’s freedom?”

She is “madly in love” with the public domain and public culture and sees it as “The area where everyone can be inside the picture.” Thus, virtually all her works are public revealing our unlimited powers of transformation – from changing degraded identities of service workers, to the restoration of ravaged landscapes, to individual and urban re-birth via water and fire rituals. Working for decades on 3 closed landfills, she is presently concentrating on Fresh Kills in NYC, formerly the world’s largest municipal landfill, as Percent for Art Artist of Fresh Kills, as well as Danehy Park in Cambridge, and the Ayalon Park in Israel. She has completed 6 work ballets with workers, trucks, barges, and hundred of tons of recyclables: in NYC, Pittsburgh, France, Holland, and Tokamachi, Japan. Recent and forthcoming exhibitions are a one person show in the Feldman Gallery Booth at the International Armory Art Fair in NYC, WACK! Art & the Feminist Revolution at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Sharjah Biennial 8, United Arab Emirates. The unsalaried Artist In Residence in the NYC Department of Sanitation for 30 years, she is represented by Ronald Feldman Fine Arts in NYC. Often a visiting artist, she will teach at Yale in the sculpture department in 2007—2008. She has received multiple awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and the NY State Council on the Arts and support from the Guggenheim, Andy Warhol, Joan Mitchell, and Anonymous Was a Woman Foundations.

INFO 213/621-1745 or education@moca.org
FREE with museum admission

Above image: Hartford Wash: Washing, Tracks, Maintenance:Outside, 1973 performance at Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT, part of Maintenance Art Performance Series, 1973-74. Image courtesy Ronald Feldman Gallery

Thursday, May 24
6:30pm
THE GEFFEN CONTEMPORARY AT MOCA

Join WACK! curator Connie Butler for a walkthrough of her groundbreaking exhibition.

Connie Butler is the Robert Lehman Foundation Chief Curator of Drawings at The Museum of Modern Art, a position she has held since February of 2006. From 1996-2006, she was Curator at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Butler is the curator of WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, an international survey of feminist art which opened at MOCA in Los Angeles on March 4, 2007, and which will travel to The National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington DC, PS 1 Contemporary Art Center, New York, NY and The Vancouver Art Gallery.

A selection of Connie Butler’s previous exhibitions at MOCA include Robert Smithson, September 2004, Willem deKooning: Tracing the Figure, 2002, Flight Patterns, 2000, and Afterimage: Drawing through Process, 1999. She is currently working on a monographic exhibition of the South African artist Marlene Dumas, which will be co-organized by MOCA Los Angeles and The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Connie Butler completed graduate work in art history at Berkeley in 1987 and, in 1996, did further graduate studies in the PhD program at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Butler has taught and lectured extensively and contributed to publications including Art + Text, Parkett and Art Journal.