Marilyn Minter (born 1948) is an American visual artist who is perhaps best known for her sensual paintings and photographs done in the photorealism style that blur the line between commercial and fine art. Minter currently teaches in the MFA department at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.
Early life and education
Minter was born in Shreveport, Louisiana, in 1948. She was raised in Florida.
In 1970 she attained a BFA from the University of Florida in Gainesville. In 1972 she received an MFA in painting from Syracuse University.
Style
Her photographs and works often include sexuality and erotic imagery. Minter's process begins by staging photoshoots with film. She eschews digital manipulation, instead favoring a conventional darkroom process for developing stills. She does not crop or digitally manipulate her photographs. Her paintings, on the other hand, are made by combining negatives in photoshop to make a whole new image. This new image is then turned into paintings created through the layering of enamel paint on aluminum. Minter and her assistants work directly from this newly created digital image. The last layer is applied with fingertips to create a modeling or softening of the paintbrush lines.
Career
Minter's career began while she was a student at the University of Florida, where she created a series of photographic studies involving her drug-addicted mother with the guidance of Diane Arbus. Minter later moved to New York City in 1976, after earning a master of fine arts degree at Syracuse University, and began collaborating with the German expressionist painter Christof Kohlhofer. Through the 1980s, she explored Pop-derived pictures often incorporating sexuality, setting the tone for many of her works. Although their joint work gained critical acclaim, when their 1984 and 1986 shows at the Gracie Mansion gallery were not commercially successful, Kohlhofer and Minter parted ways.
In 1989 Minter questioned the subject matter of women artists, and why women did not address pornography in their work. The result of Minter's exploration is Porn Grid, a series of 4 panels each showcasing in graphic detail scenes of the act of fellatio, one performed by a mustachioed male, in ben-day dots like the magnified colors from the funny pages, the imagery largely obtained from "men's magazines." The feminist community did not embrace her work. She was initially accused of being in collusion with the porn industry when in fact, Minter was pushing the boundaries of the kind of work women artists could create. Minter told Artforum in 2015 "I was shocked by the negative reaction to those works at the time. I was accused of being complicit in sexism and was stunned by the idea that a woman owning sexual imagery could be taken so negatively." Minter is quick to point out that sexually provocative imagery carries negative blowback for young women artists in particular. "If you’re a young woman artist and you’re working with sexual imagery, it makes people crazy. But they’ll love it if you’re old."
In 1990, Minter produced her first video, 100 Food Porn, shot and directed by NY documentary filmmaker Ted Haimes. This video was used as a television advertisement to promote her exhibition at the Simon Watson Gallery in New York. Minter used the gallery's art advertising budget to buy 30 second slots on Late Night with David Letterman in lieu of traditional print advertising, becoming the first artist to advertise an artists' exhibition on late night television. Through the 1990s she refined her works. While still having pornographic undertones, they began to exude a sense of glamour and high-fashion. In 1998, Minter received a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship for Fine Arts.
In 2003, she was in the exhibition 4 Walls, 8 Views at the Arena Gallery founded by Art curator Renee Riccardo in New York, NY. In 2005 Minter had a solo exhibition, titled New Work: Marilyn Minter, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, focused on hyperrealistic close-ups of seemingly glamorous images, including makeup-laden lips, eyes, and toes. The following year Minter was featured in the Whitney Bienniale, and in a partnership with Creative Time, was given ad space on four billboards in Manhattan's Chelsea district. The billboards presented photographs of high heels kicking around in dirty water, and stayed up for a month.