Artist: Mierle Laderman Ukeles
Mierle Laderman Ukeles is the artist in residence for the New York City department of sanitation and has worked closely with the Staten Island Fresh Kills landfill. Like DeBris’s art, Ukeles’s Proposal for 1 Million People to Participate in an Artwork for Fresh Kills Park also forces the public to consider the items they discard. Ukeles’s project is described as follows:
[S]he proposes that over 1 million members of the public, or ‘Donor Citizens,’ create or select something of great personal value to be made into a ‘Public Offering.’ These offerings will be . . . photographically documented, registered, and then embedded in a transparent recycled glass block. A unique barcode will be given to each donor as a receipt, and then the barcode will be engraved onto the surface of the block, as part of its design. Eventually, the glass blocks will be placed at the new Fresh Kills Park, permanently embedded into the landscape along miles of pathways and retaining walls throughout the site.
Ukeles’s work links consumerism to the waste produced by U.S. society. Rather than thoughtlessly relinquishing our once-desired items to the trash, Ukeles hopes that each donor citizen attributes care to the object they donate to the city and that generations of family members will visit the discarded or “donated” objects at the social sculpture in Fresh Kills Park.
