Patricia C. Phillips

The first comprehensive monograph devoted to Mierle Laderman Ukeles and her groundbreaking participatory art practice. The work of Mierle Laderman Ukeles brilliantly bridges feminism, environmentalism, and participatory art practice. Whether it’s her groundbreaking Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969!, which decries the separation, especially for women, between art on the one hand and caring for family, city, and planet on the other; or The Social Mirror, in which she covered a New York City Department of Sanitation truck entirely in mirrored glass—Ukeles's fascinating body of work includes public art installations, exhibitions, and performances around the world, frequently created in collaboration with sanitation and municipal workers, museum visitors, and the public. This first comprehensive book on the influential artist explores her legendary tenure as artist-in-residence at New York City’s Department of Sanitation, which has paved the way for similar "embedded artists" in government and community organizations. Essays, interviews, and striking illustrations offer important perspectives on an artist who has transformed our ideas about the feminist, urban, ecological, and resilient aspects of artistic experience.… (mehr)

At first glance SITE's Highrise of Homes project can be seen as an extension of the "paper architecture" of the 1970s; meant to provoke rather than find a built reality. But after pages of historical precedents and more of Wines's beautiful drawings, the architect/artist explains that the project is not meant to exist only on paper; it is meant to be built. He includes interviews with developers and residents of urban dwellings who, respectively, tell him the idea of single-family houses elevated on a high-rise frame will never happen and is a great idea, respectively. Decades later the same struggle between the city and suburbs carries on, and this project is one of the few that takes both sides seriously.… (mehr)