Marilyn Minter

Marilyn Minter was born in 1948 in Shreveport, Louisiana, and was raised largely in Florida, in Miami Beach and Fort Lauderdale. She earned a BFA from the University of Florida in Gainesville in 1970 and an MFA in painting from Syracuse University in 1972.

Her practice moved between painting, photography, and video, developing a hyperreal, enamel-on-metal style built from her own photographs of skin, mouths, jewelry, and wet or glittered surfaces. She had her first solo museum exhibition, New Work: Marilyn Minter, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2005, and was included in the 2006 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Her video Green Pink Caviar was shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York from 2010 to 2011.

A four-venue retrospective, Pretty/Dirty, originated at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston in 2015 and traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, the Orange County Museum of Art, and the Brooklyn Museum through 2017. She has continued to exhibit steadily since, including Nasty Woman at the SCAD Museum of Art in 2020 and All Wet at MO.CO. Panacee in Montpellier, France, in 2021. She teaches in the MFA program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, where she lives and works. In 2025 she was the subject of profiles in The New Yorker and The New York Times timed to a solo exhibition at Regen Projects in Los Angeles, and in 2026 Anderson Ranch Arts Center named her its International Artist honoree.

No verbatim critical quotation from a named critic in a major outlet could be confirmed in available sources, so none is reproduced here. In general terms, critical attention has followed her institutional trajectory: inclusion in the 2001 to 2006 conversation around feminist and body-focused contemporary painting culminated in the 2006 Whitney Biennial, the MoMA presentation of Green Pink Caviar affirmed her standing in video and new media, and the 2015 to 2017 Pretty/Dirty retrospective consolidated a reading of her work as a sustained, uncomfortable inquiry into beauty, glamour, and desire. Recent profiles in The New Yorker and The New York Times in 2025 continued to treat her as an active, closely watched figure rather than a historical one.

Minter's auction footprint is small relative to her institutional profile. Her documented auction high is USD 269,000 for the painting Wave, sold at Phillips New York in 2015 (exact sale date not confirmed in available records). A more recent sale, Splattered, brought USD 40,600 at Sotheby's New York on November 19, 2025, well below the 2015 high, illustrating how few data points anchor her market. Press coverage in 2025 noted that her prices have lagged those of some male contemporaries with comparable institutional standing, though no specific comparative figures were cited.

There is no published catalogue raisonne for Minter, and verification of works rests on the artist's studio and her representing galleries, Salon 94, Regen Projects, Lehmann Maupin, Gavlak Gallery, and Baldwin Gallery. Her auction record is built from very few public sales, so any single result, including the 2015 high for Wave, should be read with caution rather than as a stable benchmark. Her deep museum presence, spanning MoMA, the Whitney, the Guggenheim, Tate Modern, and MOCA Los Angeles among others, is the more reliable signal of durability than the currently thin secondary market.