Ted Audio Collective.

Design Matters will be back on Monday, February 22nd with the season of new episodes.

In the meantime, we wanted to replay this interview from April of 2020.

This is how I feel about the creative process.

That if you listen to your inner vision, you listen to your own voice, you make art from that place.

Sit or later, the zeitgeist hits you, or not.

Some people have to die first, but the zeitgeist sooner or later, we'll catch up with him.

It's fair in the end, perhaps, but there's so many great artists who died nobody even knew they were.

And I feel like I'm one of the lucky ones. It hit me when I was alive.

This is Design Matters with Debbie Norman.

On this episode, Debbie talks with artist Marilyn Mentor about the ups and downs of her career,

and about the use of sexual imagery and her work.

It seemed really natural for me, or took for women to start making images for their own pleasure and amusement.

Because I like porn, it turned me on.

This interview was conducted remotely on Wednesday, April 1st, 2020, when both Marilyn Mentor and Debbie were socially isolating in their respective houses.

Hey, listener, a quick favor. We are conducting an audience survey, and we'd be really grateful if you could take just a few minutes to respond.

Please visit survey.prx.org slash Design Matters to take the survey today.

That's survey.prx.org slash Design Matters. Thanks.

Marilyn Mentor straddles the line between commercial and fine art, as well as anybody, since Andy Warhol.

Her photorealistic images are simultaneously beautiful, erotic, and disturbing, and they are striking in glossy magazines or on museum walls.

At the center of her work is the body, specifically the female body, and we look at her glamorous photographs and paintings of eyes and lips, tongues and toes, with recognition and unease.

Recently, Mentor has been bringing her skills into the political arena, and we'll talk about that, her long career, and more in today's interview.

...