For ⟶ forever... is the latest work by Ukeles to honor New York City’s underappreciated municipal workers. In 1979, while working as an unsalaried artist-in-residence for the New York City Department of Sanitation, she set out to shake hands with every one of the city’s 8,500 sanitation workers in a piece of performance dubbed Touch Sanitation (1979–80). “I wanted to make a human mapping of the entire maintenance underbelly of NYC,” Ukeles said of Touch Sanitation. “It was about the whole person’s capability and the meaningfulness of what they were doing.”Interest in Ukeles's work has seen a significant uptick in recent years. According to Artsy data, there have been as many inquiries for Ukeles’s work thus far in 2020 as there were in all of 2019.

Source: The North Africa Journal September 08, 2020 21:33 UTC