A creative response to the work of artist Marilyn Minter

My name is Michelle Ratchford. I’m in my 4th year at Michigan State University majoring in Global Studies and Chinese, and I am an Associate Interviews Producer for The Creative Process.

Marilyn Minter is deeply engaged and highly political. She recognizes her own positionality in the world, pairs it with her lived experience, and uses that to drive her art and enable change.

Themes in the forefront of a lot of Marilyn’s works are her desires for change and to see unorthodox beauty. She departs from many societal comfort zones to create art that isn’t always seen, but is honest, realistic, and straight forward.

Marilyn talks about how when she took photos of her mother who was a drug addict, she was unable to grasp what was so surprising and foreign to others about these photos of her mom. Along the same vein, she mentioned the concept of “high end addiction”, another concept that confuses the audience, who were more than likely socially trained to associate drugs with negatives. She has also created paintings of naked women with generous amounts of visible body hair.

These are just a few of the many examples of art that she has created that to her, are completely normalized but are outside of our societal comfort zone.

One part that stuck out for me was when she mentioned how she felt she had to create and make art because that’s the only thing she is able to do.

Marilyn had an almost visceral need to make art, regardless of whether people liked what she was doing or not. As a student, I felt a wave of reassurance wash over me when she mentioned that. I originally was a Genomics and Molecular Genetics major, and while I found it interesting I was absolutely miserable. I knew that I had to change my major, so I switched to Global Studies, and did that with another major in Chinese, and minors in bioethics, religious studies, and Arabic. These changes made sense to me and I understood that this is what I had to do to be happy and feel like what I was doing was meaningful and purposeful enough to sustain myself now and in the future. Unfortunately, its taken quite some time to have my immediate family understand and support me. Similar to Marilyn, I knew I would always have a voice, but for me, its manifesting in ways outside of art. After graduation, I plan to engage in nonprofit work and eventually get a PhD so that I can teach.