WEAD's 30th anniversary FUNDRAISER & Film Screening!

WEAD is celebrating its 30th anniversary! We're thrilled to have you join us. 

FUNDRAISER & Film Screening of Maintenance Artist at the New Parkway Theater

The screening will kick off with a special intro by the film’s writer/director, Toby Perl Freilich, followed by a LIVE RAFFLE with lots of exciting prizes!

More about the film below, plus TRAILER 

Maintenance Artist, Directed by Toby Perl Freilich · 2025 · 95 min

In the late 1960s, Mierle Laderman Ukeles was a young artist who was told, in effect, that she had to pick: be a mother or be an artist. She refused to pick. Instead, she wrote a manifesto saying that the work she did every day, like washing, cleaning, and caring for her children, was art. Then she kept going. She scrubbed museum floors as performance. She shook the hand of every New York City sanitation worker and thanked each one. She became the city’s first artist-in-residence at the Department of Sanitation, a job she has held for more than forty years.

Maintenance Artist is the first feature documentary about her. It is funny, brave, and full of never-before-seen archival footage. Ukeles shows that you don’t have to accept the choices other people hand you, and that the work the world ignores, often done by women, deserves respect. She broke into a male-dominated art world by insisting that care matters. Girls will see a woman who changed what counts as art, and who makes the case that how we look after each other and the earth matters too.