Sunday, June 15
2:00 PM - 4:00 PM

National Gallery of Art, East Building Auditorium

4th Street NW and Constitution Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20565

Maintenance Artist

Director

Toby Perl Freilich

Producer

Judith Mizrachy

Consulting Producer

Alysa Nahmias

Archival Producer

Johanna Schiller

Editor

Anne Alvergue

Consulting Editor

Co-Editor

Assistant Editor

Cinematographers

Vanessa Carr, Roger Grange, Uriel Sinai

Additional Cinematography

Music

Olivier and Clare Manchon

Sound

Narration

Contact

Toby Perl Freilich, Framework Films tobyperl@gmail.com

“After the Revolution, who’s going to pick up the garbage on Monday morning?” challenged artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles. After she became a mother, Ukeles published a daring manifesto declaring all her acts of household maintenance, including childcare, to be performance art. As she blasted her way into the largely male late-1960s avant-garde, Ukeles began to scale up her “maintenance revolution,” collaborating with the invisible class of workers who maintain museums, galleries and public spaces. In 1977, she radically reframed public art by becoming the first official, unsalaried artist-in-residence at NYC’s Sanitation Department. With unprecedented access to the artist and never-before-seen archival material from her private collection, the film traces Ukeles’ career through her own creative journey, and within the nexus of 1960s-70s feminism, budding environmental awareness, and the artistic revolution that nurtured it. MAINTENANCE ARTIST is the first feature-length documentary to tell the stirring story of this revolutionary force in contemporary art.

Mierle Laderman Ukeles in person!

Director, Maintenance Artist

Toby Perl Freilich co-produced and co-directed Moynihan, which had a t2018 theatrical debut at NYC’s Film Forum and a broadcast premiere on PBS’ American Masters series in March 2024. The film was an L.A. Times Critic’s Pick, which acclaimed it as “a sterling portrait of a singular American statesman. Produced with major support from the Ford Foundation’s JustFilms, Moynihan is a film biography of the late NY Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan through an exploration of his ideas.

Freilich wrote, directed, and produced Inventing Our Life: The Kibbutz Experiment, released theatrically in 2012. Variety called it “poignant… and thought-provoking.” It was hailed by The N.Y. Times as “fascinating,” and “excellent” by NPR, which remarked that “Freilich comes to her subject with a generous curiosity and a gift for digging beneath the usual debates.”

Freilich co-produced and wrote the documentary film, Secret Lives: Hidden Children and Their Rescuers, selected by Andrew Sarris as one of the ten best non-fiction films of 2003, featured on HBO/Cinemax, and winner of numerous festival awards. The film was nominated for a News and Documentary Emmy in the categories of Outstanding Achievement in Writing, and Outstanding Historical Programming.

Freilich is a contributing writer to the magazines, Tablet, Sh’ma, the Jewish Review of Books and The Forward, where she was awarded a Simon Rockower Award for Excellence.