Guerrilla Girls

Guerrilla Girls, American group of art activists, founded in 1985 in New York City with the twofold mission of bringing attention to women artists and artists of color and exposing the domination of white males in the art establishment. They adopted the term guerrilla for their unconventional tactics and, in a play on words, donned gorilla masks when in public.

Beginning

In 1984 the Museum of Modern Art in New York City mounted a large exhibit titled “An International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture,” intended to showcase the leading artists of the time. However, only 13 women out of a total of 169 artists were included. This disparity became the impetus for the formation of an influential and energetic activist group the following year to combat sexism and racism in the art world.

Activism

The group’s members, women artists and art professionals, remained anonymous and assumed pseudonyms of famous women artists of the past, such as Käthe Kollwitz and Frida Kahlo. They researched statistics on discrimination and made their findings public via posters that were strongly worded but displayed an ironic sense of humor. The posters carried the legend “A public service message from the Guerrilla Girls, conscience of the art world.” Some of the issues that they addressed include the portrayal of female nudity, unequal pay, lack of shows, lack of representation in art history, and issues of career and family. Perhaps one of their most famous pieces, Do Women Have To Be Naked To Get Into the Met. Museum? (1989), was a poster referring to the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City. It suggested, through the statistics listed on the poster, that the museum had many depictions of women—notably in the nude—but very few artworks by women. Their direct-action methods were intended to provoke a response that would lead to discussion and effect change.

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Other work

In addition to displaying and selling posters, they lectured widely and published books such as Confessions of the Guerrilla Girls (1995), a history of the movement; A Guerrilla Girl’s Bedside Companion to the History of Western Art (1998); and Guerrilla Girls: The Art of Behaving Badly (2020). By the mid-1990s the group’s activism had begun to expand beyond the art world to address other issues such as affirmative action, environmentalism, abortion, and theater. As a result, in 2001 the group split into three independent entities: Guerrilla Girls on Tour, a traveling theater collective; GuerrillaGirlsBroadBand, a digital-media endeavor; and Guerrilla Girls, Inc., a continuation of the original art-focused group.