Marilyn Minter
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Marilyn Minter (born 1948) is an American artist currently living and working in New York City.
Early life
Minter was born in Shreveport, Louisiana and raised in Florida in an upper middle class household. Her father was an alcoholic, compulsive gambler, and occasional boxing promoter while her mom was a drug addict. As an undergraduate at the University of Florida Minter took some photographs of her mother which drew the attention of visiting instructor Diane Arbus.
Minter moved to New York City in 1976, after finishing an MFA at Syracuse University. She became involved in the nightclub scene in Manhattan of the late 70’s and early 80’s, which included abusing drugs and alcohol. At the time she also had a job teaching in a Catholic boy’s school. In 1985 she cleaned up her act and began working in art again.
Work
In 1989 Minter created a series of works based on images from hardcore pornography. She received much criticism for this from feminists who saw it as an expression of the victimization and objectification of women, rather than a statement on the absurdity of such images.
In 2005 Minter had a solo exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which focused on her recent works - hyperrealistic close-ups of glamourous images, including makeup-laden lips, eyes, and toes. In March 2006 Minter took out 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 in Chelsea for a month. Minter also had a spot in the 2006 Whitney Biennial.
In 2007, her first retrospective monograph was published, and she had shows in Sweden, the U.K., Spain, and France. A series of photographs she took of Pamela Anderson, commissioned by the art quarterly Parkett, were later featured on the cover of Zoetrope: All-Story.
