Talks & Performances

Director's Talk

James S. Snyder in Conversation with Mierle Laderman Ukeles and Toby Perl Freilich

Nov. 13, 2025 6:30 pm - 7:30 pm
Scheuer Auditorium

James S. Snyder, Helen Goldsmith Menschel Director, is joined by filmmaker Toby Perl Freilich and artist Mierle Lauderman Ukeles on their recent project MAINTENANCE ARTIST. Their work documents Ukeles’s long career working in performance art, participatory projects, feminist critiques, and practices of care, leading to her self-designation as a “maintenance artist.”

About the speakers:

Toby Perl Freilich produced and directed MAINTENANCE ARTIST about pioneering artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles, which premiered at the 2025 Tribeca Film Festival and had a special screening at the National Gallery of Art for DC/DOX. She also co-produced and co-directed Moynihan, released theatrically in 2018 and broadcast on PBS’ American Masters series in 2024. She co-produced and wrote the documentary film, Secret Lives: Hidden Children and Their Rescuers, winner of numerous festival awards, and Emmy nominations for a news and documentary for Writing, and Outstanding Historical Programming.

Since 1977, when Mierle Laderman Ukeles became the official, unsalaried Artist-in-Residence at the New York City Department of Sanitation, she has created art that deals with the unending contradiction and tension between freedom and necessity, endless maintenance and service work that “keeps the city alive,” and our power to transform degraded land and water into healthy public places. Her multi-media works, launched by her MANIFESTO FOR MAINTENANCE ART 1969, crashes boundaries between labor and performance, system and spirit, unveils connections between feminism, workers’ rights and the environment. Her work is featured in MAINTENANCE ARTIST, a documentary film directed by Toby Perl Freilich. Some of the public collections her work is held in include the Whitney Museum, Jewish Museum, Guggenheim Museum, Migros Museum, Zurich, Princeton Art Museum, and Wadsworth Athenaeum.

Tickets: $24 General; $16 Students and Seniors; $14 Jewish Museum members
Doors open at 6 pm; Includes Museum Admission

The Morris W. Offit Lecture Series at the Jewish Museum is made possible in part by the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Foundation.

 

 

 

Director's Talk

Headshot courtesy of speakers; James Snyder by ©2025 Timothy Greenfield-Sanders