Glamour Asks Top Female Artists to Define Glamour

We’ll admit to having found the April issue of Glamour, in which actress Hayden Panettiere is for some reason dressed as Amelia Earhart, rather befuddling, until we hit page 261, which is given over to the unmistakably fantastic work of artist Marilyn Minter. As part of the magazine’s 70th anniversary celebration (that’s the April 1939 cover, at left), Glamour photo editor Suzanne Donaldson invited ten top female artists to define glamour. The artists—Minter, Nina Chanel Abney, Rita Ackermann, Sarah Charlesworth, Tracey Emin, Rachel Feinstein, Laurie Simmons, Lorna Simpson, Mickalene Thomas, and Kara Walker—responded with everything from a wall of framed found photo-booth portraits and ink drawings (Simpson) to an eerie six-foot tall resin sculpture based on the Commedia dell’arte character of Punch, en famille (Feinstein).

“I got a broad range of responses, from gorgeous to disturbing,” notes Donaldson. “We are so used to being enticed by photographs in magazines, but this art doesn’t offer easy answers; it pokes the reader and poses the challenge: What is glamour to you?” Click “continued…” to see a few of the works from “The Glamour Project,” which is on view through March 21 at Lehmann Maupin Gallery in New York City as well in the pages of Glamour.

Marilyn Minter’s “Chewing Pink” (2008), a plexiglass-mounted c-print, would have made for a dynamite cover. The artist defines glamour as “anything that inspires fascination.” Lips caked in hot pink Baker’s Sugar do just that.

Meet Qusuquzah. Mickalene Thomas accented this 2008 portrait of her with hundreds of rhinestones. “I’m always looking for strong, beautiful, and complex women to model for me,” says Thomas. “Qusuquzah embodies the allure of glamour.”

“Glamour is getting ready to go to the party—a bath, a dress, lipstick, perfume, kissing your children good night,” Laurie Simmons told the magazine. “The rest of the evening is overrated.” She used dollhouse furniture and a 1967 issue of Glamour to create the above photograph, “Pink and Yellow I” (2009).

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