Interview

Since 1977 Mierle Laderman Ukeles has been a volunteer artist-in-residence at the New York City Department of Sanitation, allowing her to introduce radical art into a public system. Since she wrote the Manifesto for Main-tenance Art (1969), virtually all of Ukeles’s work has been public. Recent permanent commissions include Percent for Art Fresh Kills Landfill Project, New York City, the world’s largest landfill; Schuylkill River Park, Philadelphia; Creative Time, New York City; and Ayalon Park, Israel.

Stuart wanders through her influences coming from the California landscape and culture of her childhood through her encounter with the New York art world. Standing as an outsider to 'mainstream' art practice, Stuart focused on the natural world of quarries, waterfalls, and Indian mounds while revealing the cultural and geological history of these spaces, and how to trace these histories onto large paper scrolls and in books layered to parallel historical change.

Interview by Kate Horsfield.

A historical interview originally recorded in 1978. Re-edited in 2008.

Mel Chin received national attention when he had to defend the artistic merits of his work Revival Field to the NEA in 1990. The work is a public sculpture aimed at cleansing toxically polluted areas of land through the introduction of hyperaccumulators, plants that absorb heavy metals through their vascular systems. In this interview with Craig Adcock, Chin discusses the research and development that went into Revival Field, which combines such disciplines as alchemy, botany, and ecology, and the subsequent controversy that resulted from the piece.

Martha Rosler was born in Brooklyn, New York. She received her BA from Brooklyn College in 1965 and her MFA from the University of California, San Diego in 1974. Rosler has produced seminal works in the fields of photography, performance, video, installation, criticism, and theory. Committed to an art that engages a public beyond the confines of the art world, Rosler investigates how socioeconomic realities and political ideologies dominate everyday life.

Marcia Tucker was the founding director of the New Museum of Contemporary Art from 1977 to 1999, during which time she organized major exhibitions like The Time of Our Lives (1999), A Labor of Love (1996), and Bad Girls (1994); and edited the series Documentary Sources in Contemporary Art, five books which the New Museum also published. Tucker considered the museum a “laboratory” organization where both art and the practices of the institution itself were always in question.

Shu Lea Cheang tackles conceptions of racial assimilation in American culture, examining the political underbelly of everyday situations that affect the relationship between individuals and society. Using video in formally innovative installations, her works include the Airwaves Project, which focused on the one-way flow of global information and industrial waste, and Those Fluttering Objects of Desire, an installation presenting the work of women artists negotiating interracial sexual politics.

Sharon Lockhart is a photographer and filmmaker. Her photographic and filmic works interrogate the inversion of the static image as cinematic and the manipulation of the moving image into a static/stop-motion frame. Her work also contemplates how we perceive our own real-time realities. Her first film, Khabil, A Woman Under the Influence, was completed in 1994. In 1996 Lockhart was awarded a grant from the Asian Cultural Council to spend three months in Japan.