Brown’s hosting a symposium on arts and the environment this week, with a keynote delivered by fascinating New York artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles. As a young New Yorker she hung out with Rothko and Pollock, but in 1968 she had a baby and got a day job (at which point she fell out of the social scene). Her work is largely performance-based and primarily focused on labor. Touch Sanitation, her best known project, involved traversing New York City for nearly a year, shaking the hands of the city’s entire fleet of 8,500 sanitation workers. Long underappreciated, Laderman Ukeles was the subject of a large fifty-year retrospective at New York’s Queens Museum.
The event is free but advance registration is strongly recommended.