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• MAINTENANCE ARTIST : Screening and Q&A with Patricia Phillips, Tom Finkelpearl and Toby Perl Freilich

  • When
    Thursday, January 15, 2026
  •  
    12:00 PM - 1:30 PM
  • Location
    ZOOM - Mountain Time

  Register

  
  

  Mierle Laderman Ukeles:

  MAINTENANCE ARTIST

  Online Documentary Screening and Q&A

  Thursday, January 15 Timebuddy
  

  United States: 9am HST, 11am PST, Noon MST, 1pm CST, 2pm EST

  Europe: 19:00 GMT, 20:00 CET  Australia: Friday, January 16, 6:00am AEDT

  Q&A with curators Patricia Phillips and Tom Finkelpearl, and director Toby Perl Freilich

  After the Revolution, who’s going to pick up the garbage?

  MAINTENANCE ARTIST is the first feature documentary about groundbreaking public artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles, the New York City Sanitation Department’s artist-in-residence.

  ONLINE SCREENING COMING SOON

  (link will be provided in confirmation email before January 8)

  header photo credit: Marcia Bricker
  

  
  

  Guest Speakers

  

  Toby Perl Freilich produced and directed Maintenance Artist, which premiered at the 2025 Tribeca Film Festival and has had special screenings at the National Gallery of Art and the Museums of Fine Arts in Houston and Boston. She co-produced and co-directed Moynihan, broadcast in 2024 on PBS’ American Masters series. Freilich directed and produced Inventing Our Life: The Kibbutz Experiment, hailed by the NY Times as “fascinating” and by NPR as “excellent.” She co-produced and wrote Secret Lives: Hidden Children and Their Rescuers, selected by Andrew Sarris as one of the ten best non-fiction films of 2003. Freilich was nominated for a news and documentary Emmy for Writing, and Secret Lives was nominated in the category of Outstanding Historical Programming. Perl Freilich also co-produced the Emmy-nominated Resistance: Untold Stories of Jewish Partisans that was broadcast nationally on PBS. She was a 2025 Jewish Film Institute resident and is a contributing writer to the magazines Tablet, the Jewish Review of Books and the Forward.
  

  
  

  
  

  Tom Finkelpearl organized fifteen shows at PS1 in the 1980s, managed over 100 public art commissions at New York City's Department of Cultural Affairs (DCLA) in the 1990s, spearheaded a 50,000 square foot expansion as Director of the Queens Museum (2002-2014), and oversaw the city’s cultural policy and funding when he returned to DCLA as Commissioner (2014-2020). Since then, he has been a consultant for the Mellon Foundation (2020-21),and was appointed Social Practice Teaching Scholar in Residence at SP CUNY (2023-present). He co-curated a show of Christine Sun Kim’s work at the Whitney Museum of American Art (2025) and Walker Art Center (2026). Currently he is working on his third book, Recast the Museum (working title) in collaboration with the artist Pablo Helguera. He has worked on projects with Mierle Laderman Ukeles in New York, Los Angeles, Givors, France and Niigata, Japan. 

  
  

  Patricia C. Phillips is a writer, editor, curator, and academic leader whose independent and collaborative work frequently focuses on public art, architecture, landscape, environmental conditions, and their dynamic intersection. In addition to these areas of research and focus, she has held significant academic appointments at Parsons School of Design / TheNew School, State University of New York at New Paltz, Cornell University / College of Architecture, Art, and Planning, Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), and Moore College of Art and Design. From 2002-2007, she served as Editor-in-Chief of Art Journal, a College Art Association (CAA) peer-reviewed quarterly. Following years in higher education and future-facing leadership, she currently focuses on critical writing and curatorial initiatives on urgent issues of the public realm including climate change -- vulnerability and volatility --environmental crises, contaminated, at risk sites, and (at this time) the creative and critical roles of artists as witnesses, collaborators, communicators, and catalysts. Her work seeks to summon investigation, communication, engagement, and remediation. She was Guest Curator of "Mierle Laderman Ukeles: Maintenance Art" at the Queens Museum and a contributor/writer to the book MIERLE LADERMAN UKELES: Maintenance Art book (Del Monico*Prestel).

  
  

  Cost is $10 per person for screening the documentary (paid separately through screening website). Screening will be available one week prior to Q&A. Q&A is free for members and $5 for non-members. All participants MUST REGISTER. 

  
  

  Show details
• ecofiction book club

  • When
    Sunday, January 18, 2026
  •  
    1:00 PM - 2:00 PM
  • Location
    ZOOM - Mountain Time

  Register

  
  

  ecofiction book club
  

  Led by Colette Copeland
  

  2026 February, May, September

  
  

  Initial Meet Up, Sunday, January 18

  United States: 10am HST, Noon PST, 1pm MST, 2pm CST, 3pm EST 

  Europe: 20:00 GMT, 21:00 CET

  Australia: Monday, January 19, 7am AEDT

  Welcome to the ecoartspace ecofiction book club for 2026, which will be led by member Colette Copeland. There will be three books and three online meet ups. Discussions starting in February, then May, and September. We will be meeting in January for introductions and to come up with the best days/times to convene. Depending on how many participants sign up, discussions will last somewhere between 60-90 minutes. The three books to be read include: Once There Were Wolves (2022) by Charlotte McConaghy situated in Scotland where a team of biologists are reintroudcing gray wolves in the Highlands; second, a story of a young wife and mother on a failing farm in rural Tennessee titled Flight Behavior (2015) by Barbara Kingsolver that energizes religious leaders, climate scientists, environmentalists, and politicians; and, the third set in the world's largest ocean titled Playground (2024) by Richard Powers, which explores the last wild place yet to be colonized. Discussion questions will be sent out a week before each meet up.

  "My philosophy on book choices is to emphasize different aspects of environmental issues and climate change, through contemporary literary fiction with some cross-over into other genres." Colette Copeland 

  
  

  Led by
  

  
  

  Colette Copeland is an interdisciplinary visual artist based in Granbury, Texas. Inspired by Dada and Fluxus, her artistic practice combines personal narratives, history, and contemporary culture using a variety of media including video, photography, sound, performance, printmaking and sculptural installation. Her performance videos utilize experimental narrative strategies to map the complexities of human and non-human relationships. Over the past 34 years, Copeland's work has been featured in 40 solo exhibitions and 170 group exhibitions and festivals across 35 countries. She holds a BFA from Pratt Institute and an MFA from Syracuse University and has taught at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Texas. In 2023–2024, she received a Fulbright Scholar Research Award to document contemporary female artists in India working with socially engaged practices, and to develop an experimental sound project that amplifies the voices of female, non-binary, and queer communities. Copeland currently writes for Arteidolia and Glasstire online publications and is a member of International Association of Art Critics (AICA-USA). She is an avid bibliophile and leads two monthly book clubs. 

  
  

  This series is $15 for members (only). All participants MUST REGISTER.

  
  

  Show details
• Wicked Monstrous Dialogues: Part l

  • When
    Thursday, January 22, 2026
  •  
    12:00 PM - 1:30 PM
  • Location
    ZOOM - Mountain Time

  Register

  
  

  WICKED MONSTROUS DIALOGUES: Part l

  Thursday, January 22 Timebuddy
  

  United States: 9am HST, 11am PST, Noon MST, 1pm CST, 2pm EST

  Europe: 19:00 GMT, 20:00 CET

  Australia: Friday, January 23, 6:00am AEDT

  Elise Vazelakis

  Christine Mackey

  Ruth Peche

  This winter/spring we will explore through a series of dialogues, works that our members are making today that engage plastics as a material for reuse, research, and aesthetic inquiry. Artists invited are included in the upcoming ecoartspace book titled Wicked Monstrous, that will launch fall 2026.

  This month we will hear from Elise Vazelakis, who will discuss her series Driving with My Eyes Closed using an ancient technique of twining with plastic yarn made from discarded Amazon packaging materials, Christine Mackey who will present work made in response to working on a seaweed farm in South Korea where plastics play a critical role in ocean farming. And, Ruth Peche, who will share her Solastalgia series that explores the tension between organic and synthetic, natural and artificial, handcraft and industrial.

  
  

  Each presenter will have approximately 15 minutes to discuss their work, then Q&A with audience participation following. 

  
  

  Member presenters:

  
  

  Elise Marks Vazelakis is a Los Angeles–based artist whose practice centers on transforming repurposed and unconventional materials into textile-based sculptures. Working with discarded plastics, found objects, construction materials, and other overlooked remnants, she blurs the boundary between textile and sculpture. Her work emphasizes material exploration and process, revealing how discarded materials can be reshaped into objects that invite reflection and reconsideration. Marks Vazelakis earned a BS from San Diego State University and an MFA in Fiber from California State University, Long Beach. She has had solo exhibitions in Dubai, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, and has participated in group exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles, Austin, Chicago, Toronto, Santa Fe, and Phoenix, among other cities. Her work is included in private and public collections, including the Faisaliah Resort in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. www.elisevazelakis.com  

  
  

  

  Christine Mackey, based in Ireland, cultivates relational, site-responsive works that engage with the dynamic forces of nature. Through research-led processes, she explores biodiversity loss, extinction, and material crisis, while proposing models of renewal, awareness, and positive change. In 2025, Mackey presented a major solo exhibition at The Model, Sligo, supported by an Arts Council Projects Award. Her recent international residencies and exhibition programmes include CCI Paris, the Jeollanam-do Cultural Foundation (South Korea), DrawInternational (France), the Woodland Symposium Interface (Galway), and Utopiana (Geneva). She is currently involved in the WATERlands Horizon residency programme at UCD, collaborating with artists, scientists, and ecologists on wetland rehabilitation across Europe. Mackey was awarded a Fulbright Creative Research Scholarship, undertaking independent research at cultural, educational, and environmental institutions across the United States. Her work is held in public collections throughout Ireland.  www.studiochristinemackey.com
  

  
  

  Ruth Peche is a multidisciplinary artist born and based in Madrid. Her practice explores the complex and often toxic relationship between human beings and nature, shaped by control, exploitation, and environmental abuse. Peche examines how progress and consumer culture have led to landscapes profoundly altered by human intervention. Deeply concerned with the saturation of plastic waste, she intercepts discarded materials before they reach the waste stream and transforms them into artworks that question value, responsibility, and ethics. Her work operates at the intersection of artistic practice and environmental activism, denouncing the failure to reduce consumption and the negligent management of plastic pollution. Many of her interventions in natural environments are ephemeral and exist primarily as photographic images, emphasizing both fragility and loss. Through these images, Peche invites viewers to reconsider how landscapes are perceived and decontextualized, and to confront the moral implications of humanity’s relationship with the natural world. She has exhibited in Madrid, Bilbao, Valladolid, Paris, Oslo, Utrecht, and international art fairs. www.ruthpeche.com

  
  

  This event is free for members + one guest. $5 for non-members. All participants MUST REGISTER.

  
  

  Show details