From paintings and photographs to film and fashion, art is a fully sensory form of storytelling — and the best of it doesn’t just make us feel something; it says something. Like anything that’s been around for millennia, art continually changes, grows, and takes on new shapes and forms. In this series, Shondaland steps into today’s world of art and gets a taste for the trends, themes, and people who are making contemporary art what it is — now and for centuries to come.
Marilyn Minter is nervous. The multimedia artist is in her studio prepping for a photo session with feminist icon Gloria Steinem. After Minter catches the right series of shots, her photos will serve as the basis for a gauzy, color-drenched painting that, after roughly a year from start to finish, will be part of an upcoming exhibition. Minter is extremely excited to embark on the process of artistic exploration — jitters be damned.
“When I’m a little nervous, I think I’m a little better on my game,” Minter tells Shondaland. “I’m only shooting my heroes right now, so I’m a little nervous with each one. I guess it’s a good thing. I’m still working my way through. I don’t have a formula at all. So, I’m still being really playful and taking chances.”
It’s that idea that has guided Minter’s career as a photographer and painter exploring sexuality and pleasure. Experimenting as she creates images of “things we know exist but we just never see” has led Minter to render small details in spot-them-across-the-room large swaths of color and digital manipulation: a photo-realistic heel of a foot, dangling over gem-encrusted high heels; the blur of a tattoo, pubic hair, or perhaps the splash of freckles across a model’s nose; and legions of tongues caught in mid-lick, a concept that’s inspiring her newest work in progress, Fountain, which combines video with a functional water fountain.
Ultimately, hers is a world of tiny, sensual moments finally given their larger-than-life due. It’s a perspective that feels fresh and daring, and has been celebrated by everyone from Madonna (who used Minter’s imagery as a backdrop on her Sweet & Sticky Tour in 2008 and 2009) to Planned Parenthood, which honored Minter in 2016 with its Woman of Valor award and sold her “M&M collaboration” — which was portraits of Miley Cyrus — as a limited-edition print to raise money for the organization.
But the art world wasn’t always ready to embrace a woman so blatantly exploring varying degrees of eroticism.
Minter was born in Shreveport, Louisiana, before relocating to Florida to spend the rest of her childhood. She went on to study at the University of Florida, where she met her mentor, photographer Diane Arbus, who praised Minter’s unflinching desire to depict stark realities, like a study of photographs of Minter’s drug-addicted mother.
After earning her MFA in painting at Syracuse University, Minter moved to New York City in 1976 to officially begin her career and, for the next decade, developed a through line in her work of combining pop imagery with sexuality. These experimentations with publicly taboo subjects — that even up until last year had CNN dubbing her “provocative” — meant Minter, in a pre-internet age, was often combing the aisles of adult bookstores for reference material, much to the dismay of patrons. But pushing the envelope, all the while wondering why other women didn’t address the topic, was part of her work. With no small sense of amusement, Minter recalls that one of her first notable pieces, 1989’s Porn Grid — a benday-dot collection of four panels depicting various acts of fellatio — resulted in her literally being exiled for a time.
But being accused of being in collusion with the porn industry? The word traitor? Yeah, Minter has heard it all before, and she still moved forward, undeterred. Throughout the ’90s, she further refined her work to include more high-fashion and glamorous images — leading to a Guggenheim Fellowship for Fine Arts — and, for the next two decades, went on to publish the first retrospective monograph of her work, tour her art internationally, collaborate with sneaker brand Supreme on a line of skateboard decks, and show her work in institutions like the Museum of Modern Art and the Brooklyn Museum, which, in 2017, housed her "Pretty/Dirty" exhibitions, introduced by Laurie Simmons.
“I was early!” she laughs, referring to work that, as The New York Times wrote, represents “fearless renderings of both the mechanisms of beauty and its dark underbelly.” She also points out that, despite the detractors, age has helped make her come to terms with her early criticisms. “I saw that women are allowed agency and being able to make images for their own amusement pleasure. But now that I’m old, when you’re postmenopausal, you can get away with anything! Really young girls, you really get slammed by the art world or by the real world.”
Minter is well versed in both her contemporaries and the artists who came before her. For instance, her Bathers series is a modern female-gaze response to artists like Cézanne and Degas, who often painted women mid-bath. However, she’s equally comfortable exploring pop culture, joking that her broad range of references would make her an excellent Jeopardy guest. A healthy fascination with the Kardashians (“I don’t know a lot of 21-year-old billionaires out there; do you?”), Miley Cyrus (“She was just doing what Justin Bieber was doing!”), and Pamela Anderson (“She knew she was a pinup; that’s how she made her money!”) is also a very real part of her creative practice.
“It never ceases to amaze me that, for instance, fashion or glamour images are considered shallow and disposable,” Minter says. “This is one of the biggest engines of the country! You’d think more artists would be interested in examining that. Or pornography! There would be no internet without pornography content for it. We have such contempt for glamour and beauty and fashion, and it just never ceases to amaze me that it gives you so much pleasure at the same time that it creates body dysmorphia. It’s like, why is it so hard to tolerate complexity? People you think are easy to criticize, especially if they’re really popular — I truly examine that. What’s that from? Why do we build up these poor creatures? And especially women. I’ve watched your world break people, but nothing like Hollywood breaks people.”
It’s that sense of fight that also informs Minter’s ongoing dedication to advocacy. In 2018, she collaborated with For Freedoms to create a billboard for the 50 State Initiative, a campaign aimed at encouraging political participation and voting. For her billboard, which was displayed in Little Rock, Arkansas, Minter created a lavender and blue color field with the word “SAD!” graffitied across it, co-opting then-President Trump’s favorite word to subtly speak out against his time in office (which she describes with a few choice four-letter words).
After teaming up with Miley Cyrus to support Planned Parenthood in 2016, she’ll once again support the organization with a series of “bush paintings” — aka gorgeous images of female pubic hair — slated to go on sale on November 22 through Her Clique, a site that champions female-identifying artists supporting nonprofits. But while Minter is proud of the way that her aesthetic has been integrated into causes that she believes in, she doesn’t feel like involvement in hot-topic issues is necessarily part of her job description.
“You have to be called!” she says. “You know you’re one of those people. I think artists are petty. There are some artists [whose] work is about politics. You know, Barbara Kruger, or Jenny Holzer, or Hank Willis Thomas. I’m political, but mine are just threads and metaphor and humor. Not every artist is interested in that. Artists, including myself, are very myopic in what we’re really into. … But you’ll see some pretty good art coming out of this era.”
But at 73, Minter isn’t interested in hard and fast definitions. She’s here to play, explore, and create. Elevator pitches don’t resonate with her, and putting her work — or the world in general — into easily understandable boxes might be the only thing she’s not interested in.
“I used to do it,” she admits. “I think when I was younger, it was just so much easier just to try and understand the world, and then I found out that I was wrong about everything. I’m just really very curious. And I’ve always been really curious.”
More from Art in Today’s World: A Shondaland Series
Laura Studarus is a Los Angeles-based travel writer with bylines at Fast Company, BBC Travel, and Thrillist. Sometimes she can go several hours without a cup of tea. Follow her adventures on Twitter.
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