Little Girls #1 and its complement, Big Girls, share concerns found in Minter’s later work, both examining the way the female body is gazed upon—from childhood to Hollywood stardom. The funhouse-style mirroring in Little Girls #1 suggests the distorting effects of traditional notions of beauty and femininity imposed by this gaze. The dot pattern, or Benday dots, mimics newspaper printing techniques, in a fineart nod to popular culture pioneered by Pop artists of the 1950s and 1960s. Yet Minter’s paintings push into territory previously unexplored by Pop art, implicitly critiquing its subject matter, which was determined primarily by male artists.

The Coral Ridge Towers photographs—resulting from an undergraduate assignment—show the artist’s mother variously posing, lounging, and primping in the privacy of her home. The artist has described her troubled mother as a reclusive “Southern belle.” One of Minter’s main themes, the ways in which women view, mask, and display themselves, is exemplified in the extreme by her mother’s narcissism, reflected in the many mirrors of her home. To the artist’s surprise, these stark portraits disturbed her classmates, and, as a result, she did not show the work for more than twenty-five years.

Twenty years before the rise of foodie culture, 100 Food Porn drew connections between the work of food preparation—shucking, peeling, deveining, and cutting—and sexual activity. The paintings borrow from the language of drips and splashes known in the work of Abstract Expressionists, such as Jackson Pollock. They also amplify the sexual implications of flying fluid in close-cropped captures of hands in domestic action.

A hypnotic soundtrack accompanies a close-up, slow-motion video of a model’s lips moving amid a variety of slimy substances, from vodka to liquefied candy. Separated from the viewer by a pane of glass, the seemingly insatiable mouth has a clear antecedent in the porn star, but the sucking in and vomiting out—of electric green ooze, bubbles of caviar, and tangled hair—is as repulsive as it is mesmerizing. Green Pink Caviar was seen beyond the art world, appearing on billboards in New York and Los Angeles, as well as in a version used as a video backdrop during Madonna’s “Sticky and Sweet Tour.”