Marilyn On Top: Artist and Floridian Marilyn Minter Opens Up Sarah Gerard September 7, 2019 The famed artist and activist on growing up in the Sunshine State, sexual agency and sunlight as disinfectant. No sooner am I allowed inside Marilyn Minter’s Manhattan studio than she remarks on my freckles, saying, “No wonder you like my work.” The artist is known for making visible what is typically airbrushed: sweat, pimples, body hair—or what is often thought private: addiction, sex. She’s also renowned for honoring what’s regarded by patriarchal standards as unimportant: housework, fashion, glamour. Freckles are a favorite subject. As sunlight draws melanin to the skin’s surface (skin and surfaces are Minter’s fascinations), so are disgust and desire brought to the forefront and made to commingle in Minter’s work, which for the last five decades has broken down cultural barriers for women by querying society’s contradictory attitudes toward the feminine body. Clad in all black, with black-rimmed glasses and icy-blue eyes, Minter is warm, if slightly distracted, as she leads me into her spacious second-floor workroom. Behind her, facing the white walls, assistants are making final Minter in her New York City studio; Photography by Nadya Wasylko strokes with their fingers on three paintings going to Art Basel—Minter’s collaboration with her assistants has been described by one of them in The New York Times as “the closest thing there is to a Renaissance workshop.” The paintings are enormous, photorealistic enamel-on-metal depictions of women bathing behind steamed-up panes of glass simulating showers. “Have you ever noticed that art history has a lot of women grooming themselves?” Minter says. “All throughout history, this is a way to present women to the male gaze. I just thought, ‘How can I do it in a way that is empowering?’” Her models have character; they’re not the kind of girls you see in Pantene commercials. They’re mixed-race, full-bodied, with tattoos, pubic hair and piercings. During our conversation, Minter gestures at a redhead in one of the paintings, to whom her studio manager is busy adding armpit hair. “She just looked too pretty, so I thought I’d make her more real,” she says. “You go to Brooklyn now, and all the girls have long armpit hair.” I ask her if the humidity frequently depicted in her work has anything to do with her Florida upbringing. “I wonder about that too,” she says. “I’m a sweater. I used to make everything wet.” I note her signature use of condensation on glass. “There’s condensation in Florida because everything is air-conditioned,” she says. “I thought everything looked better a little wet. Sweaty. And now I think everything looks better if”—she deploys another aquatic term— “there’s some kind of filter.” She invites me to sit at a long folding table. Stacks of books and papers rest at either end. I ask her how she felt about her own freckles as a child coming of age in South Florida with what she terms “cheap Irish skin.” “I just hated mine,” she says, apologizing for having to multitask while we talk. She begins rummaging through files. Along with Art Basel preparations, she is gathering reference images from her paintings for a monograph that publishers Paul Schiek and Lester Rosso are compiling for the art press TBW Books. Her paintings begin as photographs, which she shoots in the 2,500-square-foot SoHo loft she’s rented for a thousand dollars a month since she moved to New York in the 1970s—a rent-controlled rate that is shocking to anyone with a cursory knowledge of real estate in that neighborhood. “The landlord would love to get rid of me,” she laughs. “He’s got a camera aimed at my front door.” After the initial shoots, she picks a photo to be painted, and moves it through dozens of stages of digital manipulation as the painting progresses. The final Minter shot Lady Gaga for The New York Times Magazine touches do not appear in any of the reference images, and says: “I cut her bangs.” Photography by Marilyn Minter only on the enamel. She spreads images out on the table. Among them is the photograph she used for Blue Poles, a close-up of the freckled bridge of a woman’s nose, caked on either side with glittery teal eye shadow, finished with a whitehead above the left eyebrow. “You’ve seen freckles now in the culture, but they were nowhere when I was growing up,” she says. “I was a skinny, freckled rail. I don’t think there’s anyone who’s born without feeling that there’s something wrong with them, though. They might not admit it, or might even lie to themselves, or not know it, but everyone feels like they’re different.” Later, doing commercial work, Minter discovered that freckled models looked fresh because people had never seen them before. “Then other people started using them too.” She smiles mischievously. A REALLY BAD GIRL Born in Shreveport, Louisiana, Minter moved with her family to Miami Beach around the time she entered elementary school. Louisiana was conservative, too straight-laced for her parents, who were beautiful like movie stars and wanted to live like them. Minter says they liked to drink, do drugs and party. Though her dad had a job in Louisiana working for Caterpillar, he preferred to make money gambling, and once he moved to Florida, he never had a proper job again, Minter recalls. “He was a scratch golfer, a high-end hustler, a semi- gangster. In Florida, you could get away with anything,” she says. “People went there to escape. In the ’60s, it was the land of no parents.” Blue Poles, 2007, enamel on metal, 60 by 72 inches, owned in a private collection; Photography by Marilyn Minter Minter and her two older brothers ran wild. “We were riding our bikes all over the place. We ran in packs, barefoot.” It was hot, but they lived on Biscayne Bay, so there was a breeze. Everything was across a causeway. “You walked across bridges to get everywhere.” She remembers walking to the drug store for a cherry Coke. This was during the Jim Crow era, when black people were not allowed to sit at the fountain counters. But even as a child, Minter knew racism was wrong. She insisted on using the “colored” drinking fountain. “I was pissed off that there even was one,” she says. “I saw a guy go to a counter to get a grilled cheese sandwich, and he couldn’t even sit down. He had to stand up to get it.” She invited him to sit and ordered it for him. As she says now, she’s always been an activist. She recalls that her father was a womanizer. Shortly after the family moved to Florida, when Minter was 8, he joined up with one of his wife’s friends, and Minter’s mother had a nervous breakdown. They divorced, and she became a drug addict. Her father moved in with the friend. “My mother got a little crazier all the time,” Minter says. In her 40s, she felt she had been discarded. She had never had a career and had no money or training to fall back on. She didn’t even believe women should work. “I’d seen my mother being this Southern belle, depending on a man to take care of her. I did the exact opposite. I was always going to take care of myself, and I always have.” Minter’s relationship with her father grew distant due to her mother’s resentment and obsession with getting money from him. One of her brothers had moved in with him. When Minter was about 11, her mother moved the remaining two kids to Fort Lauderdale. They lived in an isolated co-op, the first one on the otherwise virgin Galt Ocean Mile. The first four floors of the building were a luxury hotel; the upper 10 floors were condos. Minter’s friends lived a mile in either direction. No one she went to school with lived in her building. Within a few months, her brother graduated high school and went to college. Minter was left alone with her mother, who spiraled deeper into her addiction. She talked about Minter’s father incessantly and began compulsively pulling out her hair. “It was so frustrating to just get my basic needs met,” Minter says. “She couldn’t pull it together.” That year, at the age of 12, Minter taught herself how to drive. “I was hungry,” she says. By the time she reached Pompano Beach High School, she was what she calls a “really bad girl.” She got in trouble all the time for confronting her teachers for their racism. People bullied her for her beliefs. “I was at the dean’s office every week,” she says. When she did see her father, he always had a girlfriend with him. “I grew up with my dad dating girls that were 18 when I was 16. There’s this old Minter with a friend in her UF years, when she had a run-in with the man, and then these really beautiful young girls. It legendary photographer Diane Arbus; Photography by Marilyn Minter was very distorting.” Her desperation to leave home reached a fever pitch near the end of high school. She began making money from her brother’s friends, drawing reproductions of Vargas pinup girls. Then she figured out how to backdate driver’s licenses, turning eights into threes, for instance.