The World's “Preeminent Garbage Artist”
Despite many public commissions and exhibitions both in the United States and abroad, the voluble and often funny Mierle Laderman Ukeles remains best known for her singular role as the New York City Department of Sanitation's first and only “artist-in-residence.” She assumed this unsalaried position in the early 1980's, but she actually earned it while doing a conceptual piece called Touch Sanitation, for which she spent eleven months crisscrossing the city day and night to shake hands with every one of its 8,500 sanitation workers, telling each, “Thank you for keeping New York City alive.”