ELLE Women in Art: Meet Eight Women Changing the Art World Today

Marilyn Minter makes big “dirty” paintings of body parts in extreme close-up. They zero in on glistening red lips dripping with sweat. Or muddy feet in high heels splashed by rain. Or eyelids smacked with glitter. Painted in enamel on slick metal surfaces—the final coat always applied using her fingers—Minter’s pictures infuse the grotesque with the glamorous. That ability to make the repulsive look sexy has won her an audience that continues to grow—a retrospective of her career will open in 2015 at Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, then travel to other cities—and she’s only getting better at it.

Back in 1989, Minter took images from cookbooks and painted them so suggestively that she titled the works Food Porn. But for most of her career as an artist with a scarlet streak of feminism, the 65-year-old has subverted prevailing standards of beauty. “I’ve been interested in debasement my whole life,” she says. “But I don’t push boundaries on purpose—it’s just how I see, and I want to see real people. What’s wrong with not having a face-lift?” She riffs on pornography and fashion, both “powerful forces in our culture,” she says. “I’m reflecting the time I live in. It’s not interpretation.” (Her own fashion tends toward Marni, partly because the brand’s SoHo shop is across the street from the loft Minter shares with her partner of 22 years, husband Bill Miller, a retired financial adviser.)

This month, you can just make out the mouths filled with pearls in the paintings she’s showing at Art Basel Miami Beach. They look like smears under wet glass that she’s wiped off. “The glass is an illusion that gives you distance,” she says. “Sometimes there’s more information in an indirect look.”

In September, Julie Mehretu was in Moscow to show, among other pieces, a 24-foot-long abstract painting. It’s mostly white, yet quite eventful, shot through with inky flares, charging vectors, meandering loops, and staccato daubs of dark paint interrupted by washes of bright color. It’s a glorious, complex puzzle; standing before it is a little like walking into speeding traffic.

Like most of her work, the painting suggests the topography and temperature of a large, densely populated city. “It’s based on the architecture of Cairo’s Tahrir Square,” the Acne jeans–clad 43-year-old explains, before taking another trip, this time to escort one of the two young children she has with the artist Jessica Rankin to the bathroom of the family’s Harlem carriage house. The match with Rankin is a “creative project” itself, she says. “A relationship with two artists is its own making.”

Since 2000, when her work had its first major public appearance, in a group show at MoMA PS1, Mehretu’s career has been meteoric—or it would be, if her paintings didn’t take so long to make. Mural, commissioned by Goldman Sachs for the lobby of its Lower Manhattan tower, is enormous for a painting—23 by 80 feet—and required three years to complete.

While her art is distinctly urban, Mehretu grew up in leafy East Lansing, Michigan, after her Ethiopian father and American mother immigrated from Addis Ababa when she was six. February will find her at the first Cartagena, Colombia, biennial, showing the gray paintings currently taking shape in her studio. Might they reference that city’s troubled history? “I consider everything political,” she says. “I don’t see how you can live socially without participating politically.”

Curious about new directions in contemporary art? Consult Clarissa Dalrymple. Over the past 30 years, the British-born independent curator and former New York gallerist has exhibited almost psychic tendencies when it comes to alerting the rest of the world to rising stars. In 1983, she cofounded the legendary Cable Gallery at SoHo’s outer limit; when it closed five years later, she kept going, organizing shows around the world and becoming a backstage mother to many—Matthew Barney, Jorge Pardo, and Nancy Rubins among them. She gave Damien Hirst an early crack at America; Hirst, in turn, introduced her to the rest of his generation of “YBAs.”

Recently, Dalrymple took young artists Ryan Sullivan and Bree Ruais under her tireless wing—watch out—and Christopher Wool, whose first show was at Cable in 1984, is now the subject of a career survey at the Guggenheim. “It’s so ridiculous,” she says. “They’ve all become successful from the get-go.” Yet she has remained virtually underground, more visionary than businesswoman. “It’s not about having an eye for art,” says Dalrymple, sexy at 72 and a grandmother eight times over. “It’s being sensitive to the phenomenology of the time.”

What excites her antenna isn’t just the image or the material of an artwork, she says, but “the need for something to have life and be both witty and intense.” Which is a pretty accurate description of Dalrymple’s own native glamour and aristocratic carriage. For this portrait, shot in her pocket roof garden in Chelsea, she wore a John Galliano dress from Century 21. “It was $400,” she says. “More than I’ve ever spent on anything.”

In September, Dominique Lévy opened her new triplex gallery on Madison Avenue to thunderous silence—as planned. To celebrate “Audible Presence: Lucio Fontana, Yves Klein, Cy Twombly,” her inaugural exhibition, she presented a radical 1949 symphony by Klein that calls for a 70-member chorus and orchestra to hold a single tone for 20 minutes and then “play” silence for another 20. In the hushed tones of a woman who’s been at the top of her game so long that she doesn’t need to shout about it, Lévy describes the performance as “exceptional and a pleasure.”

As a dealer specializing in twentieth-century and postwar art, and as a collector of the new, she is as consumed by her passions at age 46 as she was at 19 when she curated her first exhibition, in Lausanne, the Swiss city where she grew up. “I think you can’t look forward without looking back,” she says, “or back without looking forward.” Her personal, ahead-of-the-curve collection lives in the Upper East Side home she shares with film and theater producer Dorothy Berwin and their three sons.

In 1999, its first year, the international private sales department Lévy oversaw for Christie’s had a turnover of $100 million. And in 2013, after seven years as the L in blue-chip gallery L&M Arts, she decided to open her own shop. “I was raised by a businessman to be a businesswoman,” she says of her late father, a currency trader. “I cherish partnership but I love working alone. You take all the risks but you get all of the pleasure.” Currently on view at Lévy’s gallery are ’70s and ’80s works by Ukrainian photographer Boris Mikhailov, to be followed this spring by seven decades of painting by French artist Pierre Soulages. “He’s 93,” she says, “but totally contemporary.”

Mickalene Thomas is not the sort of artist you’ll see in paint-spattered jeans. “I’ve been wearing Rick Owens pants for a week,” says the Brooklyn-based painter, muralist, photographer, and parent (with her ex, Carmen McLeod) of 15-month-old daughter Junya Rei, named for designers Rei Kawakubo and Junya Watanabe. “When I sold my first painting,” Thomas explains, “the Comme des Garçons store was the first place I went.”

That was in the early 2000s, when Thomas, now 42, became known for dazzling portraits of sensual African-American women in wildly patterned surroundings, their makeup and dresses encrusted with the artist’s signature rhinestones. Her paintings, which now include landscapes and interiors, are based on collages and photos that Thomas shoots, incorporating installations of the vintage furniture, rugs, and textiles she’s long collected. “My mother and grandmother were really good at reupholstering,” Thomas says. “I learned a lot.”

When Thomas was growing up in East Orange, New Jersey, her mother, a onetime model, gave parties to raise money to combat sickle-cell anemia. They inspired “Better Days,” an art-bar installation that became a popular nightspot during last June’s Art Basel fair. Her mother was also the subject of a short biographical film, Happy Birthday to a Beautiful Woman, the heart-stopper of Thomas’ 2012 retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum. (HBO picked it up for an upcoming documentary series.) Now she’s preparing new paintings for an exhibition in Paris next fall. Will there be rhinestones this time? Yes, and airbrushing and glitter, too, she promises: “I’m going all out.”

As the daughter of a St. Louis art dealer, Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn came naturally to the trade. “I’ve been working since high school to collect,” says the svelte 46-year-old gallerist. “I had different kinds of jobs. Then I realized the easiest was to become a dealer.”

Collector, dealer, mother of three, wife to financier Nicolas Rohatyn—and judge on the first season of Bravo reality show Work of Art—Greenberg Rohatyn is a powerhouse on the New York art scene. Her Salon 94 empire has three locales: two on the Lower East Side (she describes one as “rustic,” the other as “like a crypt”), and the third—currently featuring jewelry and mobiles by Alexander Calder in displays commissioned from contemporary artists—on the ground floor of her Upper East Side townhouse, a former orphanage adapted by architect Rafael Viñoly.

That’s where Greenberg Rohatyn stood for her portrait, dressed in Saint Laurent (“my uniform”) and perched atop a stool made of cast and dyed sand by the young Swiss design team Kueng Caputo. She surrounds herself with artists who share her taste for elemental design and provocative imagery. They include Rick Owens (for whom she produces and shows furniture), Laurie Simmons, Huma Bhabha, Lorna Simpson, and Terry Adkins, whose sculpture is at Salon 94 Bowery (the “crypt”) this month.

If running three galleries wasn’t enough, she also participates in seven art fairs a year, chairs the Performa biennial board, and advises private clients (last summer, she cast Jay Z’s Marina Abramović–inspired “Picasso Baby” video). “My life has become invested in art beyond the simple transaction of selling to buy,” she says. “If you don’t take risks, nothing changes.”

In 2006, when philanthropist and collector Nathalie de Gunzburg became chairman of its board, the Dia Art Foundation had taken a series of hits: Its director and its chairman (also a major donor) had just resigned, and the Chelsea space for its influential, yearlong exhibitions had been closed for two years. That left the petite de Gunzburg to oversee the search for a new site, a new director, and the millions of dollars needed to maintain the institution’s nearly 300,000-square-foot museum in Beacon, New York, as well as its permanent art installations in New York City, the Hamptons, New Mexico, Utah, and Kassel, Germany. “It was very challenging,” de Gunzburg admits. “But Dia is unique. It’s about the art and the artist, and it’s our duty to maintain their work so it’s seen by many generations.”

De Gunzburg had bought her first piece at 18, “a really ugly watercolor that I thought was gorgeous,” she says, laughing. She moved to New York from Paris 15 years ago, after marrying investor Charles de Gunzburg. Eventually, her taste for ’60s and ’70s minimalist art led her to Dia, which presents artworks from those decades up to the present by the likes of Richard Serra, Donald Judd, and Dan Flavin, while maintaining earthworks by Walter De Maria and Robert Smithson, the artist who created Spiral Jetty in Utah’s Great Salt Lake.

With Dia’s current director, Philippe Vergne, de Gunzburg has succeeded in acquiring new artworks and a site in NYC’s Chelsea; she’s photographed here in the raw space, where construction is slated to begin next year. “When I arrived from France, I was blown away by the level of philanthropy,” she says. “In Europe, the state pays for everything.”