MARILYN MINTER : PRETTY/DIRTY

Video (15:12): MARILYN MINTER : PRETTY/DIRTY is a short film by Eric Minh Swenson in which Marilyn Minter discusses her 2016 retrospective ‘Pretty/Dirty’.

‘Marilyn Minter: Pretty/Dirty [at Orange County Museum of Art, 2016] includes the artist’s earliest artworks, a startling photo series titled Coral Ridge Towers. While still in school, the young Minter shot one roll of film of her mother, a drug addled, darkly glamorous woman who was “mom” to the artist. Completed in 1969 when Minter was 21, the works were not shown until decades later by Linda Yablonsky, a lifelong friend of Minter’s who used them as background images for a reading program. The series’ clear relationship to the artist’s later themes of degraded beauty has made these photographs into classics of the Diane Arbus-like genre. In Pretty/Dirty they are put back into their proper historical sequence as her earliest extant work. – ERIC MINH SWENSON ART FILMS

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