Nicki Minaj gets tranformed by Francesco Vezzoli for the November 2011 W magazine’s art issue. Francesco explains why he wanted to work with Nicki on the pictorial, ”I wanted to play with the public image of a female hip-hop star. During my entire career, I have always been fascinated by powerful women in history. I have spent a lot of time researching the ways they were represented in art and how their images were used to mold the public imagination—and to convey aesthetic and philosophical ideas about beauty and sexual desire. My main interest has been to link the historical artistic approach to female representation to contemporary icons of the media era.”
