Connecting Art, Maintenance, and Motherhood: How Ukeles’s Maintenance Art Shapes Understandings of Maintenance

This paper proposes an alternative feminist understanding of maintenance by investigating the artistic practices and lived experiences of feminist artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles (b. 1939). Our main theoretical and empirical focus lies on maintenance, and we show how art and motherhood as productive connection points proffer different ways of perceiving, understanding, and practicing maintenance. By contextualizing our case within the historical backdrop of New York between the late 1960s and 1980s, we demonstrate how Ukeles’s maintenance art proposes novel ways of perceiving the value of maintenance, from the maintenance performed by mothers to considerations of the broader societal implications of maintenance. Such alternative political understanding aligns with critiques of postfeminist societal discourse. We contend that Ukeles’s art inspires a political shift in our thinking about maintenance, where maintenance is valued not solely for its indispensable and utilitarian attributes but also its relational, emotional, and embodied qualities. This nuanced understanding requests visibility for maintenance and foregrounds ‘more-than-I’, agency, and continuity of life, thereby acknowledging the inherent value of the political dimensions of maintenance.