Touch Sanitation Performance (1979–80) was a year-long work by American artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles, in which she shook the hand of every single sanitation worker in New York City (more than 8,500 people) and thanked them for “keeping New York City alive.” She traveled to garages, dumps, piers, and street corners, meeting crews across all five boroughs.
The work arose from Ukeles’s long-standing interest in what she called “maintenance art,” her term for the daily, repetitive labor of cleaning, caring, and sustaining that modern society relies upon yet habitually devalues or ignores. By engaging sanitation workers directly, she reframed their labor as essential and dignified, and she enacted a performance of care on a civic scale.
Images from Ronald Feldman Gallery and WikiArt.
