Mierle Laderman Ukeles

Since 1977 Ukeles has been the unsalaried artist in residence at New York City's Department of Sanitation, and her subject is the maintenance that keeps public space usable. For Touch Sanitation, from 1979 to 1980, she shook hands with every one of the department's roughly 8,500 workers across the five boroughs and said thank you for keeping New York alive. Later works turned garbage trucks and waste-transfer stations into galleries, and she has worked for decades on Freshkills, the former landfill on Staten Island now becoming a park.