Guerrilla Girls
Guerrilla Girls is an anonymous group of feminist, female artists devoted to fighting sexism and racism within the art world. The group formed in New York City in 1985, born out of a picket against the Museum of Modern Art the previous year. The core of the group's work is bringing gender and racial inequality into focus within the greater arts community and society at large. The Guerrilla Girls employ culture jamming in the form of posters, books, billboards, lectures, interviews, public appearances and internet interventions to expose disparities, discrimination, and corruption. They also often use humor in their work to make their serious messages engaging. The Guerrilla Girls are known for their "guerrilla" tactics, hence their name, such as hanging up posters or staging surprise exhibitions. To remain anonymous, members don gorilla masks. To permit individual identities in interviews, they use pseudonyms that refer to deceased female artists such as Frida Kahlo, Käthe Kollwitz, and Alice Neel, as well as writers and activists, such as Gertrude Stein and Harriet Tubman. According to GG1, identities are concealed because issues matter more than individual identities, "Mainly, we wanted the focus to be on the issues, not on our personalities or our own work."
History
During the height of the contemporary art movement in the late 20th century, many distinguished galleries lacked appropriate representation of female artists and curators. Museums were often privately funded by elites, predominately white males, meaning that museums were documenting power structures rather than art. Historically, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, like other major museums, had an entirely male or a predominantly male board of directors. It had a paucity of female artists on display, while, at the same time, art featuring female nudes were plentiful. The Guerrilla Girls were formed in 1985 with the purpose of exposing gender disparities in the contemporary art world. Initially, it did not plan to be a permanent organization. Its first press release, dated May 6, addressed its "campaign throughout the next weeks and next season." Membership in the group has fluctuated over the years from a high of about 30 women to a handful of active members in 2015 According to Frida Kahlo, there have been a total of 65 members.In the spring of 1985, seven women launched the Guerrilla Girls in response to the Museum of Modern Art's exhibition "An International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture", whose roster of 165 artists included only 13 women. Inaugurating MoMA's newly renovated and expanded building, this exhibition claimed to survey that era's most important painters and sculptors from 17 countries. The proportion of artists of color was even smaller, and none of them were women.
Comments attributed to the show's curator, Kynaston McShine highlight that era's explicit art world gender bias: "Kynaston McShine gave interviews saying that any artist who wasn't in the show should rethink career." However, it has been suggested that these putative quotes stem from comments in an interview McShine gave to the New York Times before the exhibition opened: “I think that some people can benefit from not being in the show.” He continued: “They will have to think about their work.” In reaction to the low proportion of women in the exhibition and McShine's bias, the Women's Caucus for the Arts led a protest with pickets across the street from MoMA. Seven future members of the Guerrilla Girls participated in this protest, but when their pickets were ignored, some of the women began to seek what Frida Kahlo calls "a more media-savvy" method of reaching the public.
The MoMA protest's lack of success in 1984 led to strategy meetings, which resulted in the formation of the Guerrilla Girls. The initial founding members were all white. The Guerrilla Girls conveyed their messages by wheat-pasted posters in downtown Manhattan, particularly in the SoHo and East Village neighborhoods, which were home to both artists and the commercial galleries that served as their initial targets.
When asked about the masks, the girls answer "We were Guerrillas before we were Gorillas. From the beginning, the press wanted publicity photos. We needed a disguise. No one remembers, for sure, how we got our fur, but one story is that at an early meeting, an original girl, a bad speller, wrote 'Gorilla' instead of 'Guerrilla'. It was an enlightened mistake. It gave us our 'mask-ulinity'." In an interview with the magazine Interview the Guerrilla Girls were quoted, "Anonymous free speech is protected by the Constitution. You'd be surprised what comes out of your mouth when you wear a mask."
A year after its founding, the group expanded its focus to include racism in the art world, attracting artists of color. They also took on projects outside of New York, enabling them to address sexism and racism nationally and internationally. Though the art world has remained the group's main focus, the Guerrilla Girls' agenda has included sexism and racism in films, mass and popular culture, and politics. Tokenism also represents a major group concern.
Periodically, the Guerrilla Girls conducted "weenie" and "banana" counts, wherein members visited institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art and counted nudes, noting the ration of male-to-female subjects, as well as the ratio of male-to-female artists represented in the various collections. Data gathered from their survey in the Met in 1989 showed that women artists had produced less than 5% of the works in the Modern Art galleries, while 85% of the nudes were female.
Early organizing was based around meetings, during which members evaluated statistical data gathered regarding gender inequality within the New York City's art scene. The Guerrilla Girls also worked closely with artists, encouraging them to speak to those within the community to bridge the gender gap where they perceived it.
Since 1985, the Guerrilla Girls have worked for an increased awareness of sexism and greater accountability on the part of curators, art dealers, collectors, and critics. The group is credited, above all, with sparking dialogue, and bringing national and international attention to issues of sexism and racism within the arts.
Influences
Many feminist artists in the 1970s dared to imagine that female artists could produce authentically and radically different art, undoing the prevailing visual paradigm. The pioneering feminist critic, Lucy Lippard curated an all-women exhibition in 1974, effectively protesting what most deemed a deeply flawed approach, that of merely assimilating women into the prevailing art system. Shaped by the 1970s women's movement, the Guerrilla Girls resolved to devise new strategies. Most noticeably, they realized that 1970s-era tools such as pickets and marches proved ineffective, as evidenced by how easily MoMA could ignore 200 protestors from the Women's Caucus for Art. "We had to have a new image and a new kind of language to appeal to a younger generation of women", recalls one of the founding Guerrilla Girls, who goes by "Liubov Popova." The Guerrilla Girls sought an alternative approach, one that would defeat views of the 1970s Feminist movements as man-hating, anti-maternal, strident, and humorless: Versed in poststructuralist theories, they adopted 1970s initiatives, but with a different language and style. Earlier feminists tackled grim and unfunny issues such as sexual violence, inspiring the Guerrilla Girls to keep their spirits intact by approaching their work with wit and laughter, thus preventing a backlash.Work: actions, posters and billboards
Art world
Throughout their existence, the Guerrilla Girls have gained the most attention for their bold protest art.The Guerrilla Girls' projects express observations, concerns, and ideals regarding numerous social topics. Their art has always been fact-driven, and informed by the group's unique approach to data collection, such as "weenie counts." To be more inclusive and to make their posters more eye-catching, the Guerrilla Girls tend to pair facts with humorous images – a form of word art. Although the Guerrilla Girls gained fame for wheat-pasting provocative campaign posters around New York City, the group has also enjoyed public commissions and indoor exhibitions.
In addition to posting posters around downtown Manhattan, they passed out thousands of small handbills based on their designs at various events. The first posters were mainly black and white fact sheets, highlighting inequalities between male and female artists with regard to a number of exhibitions, gallery representation, and pay. Their posters revealed how sexist the art world was in comparison to other industries and to national averages. For example, in 1985 they printed a poster showing that the salary gap in the art world between men and women was starker than the United States average, proclaiming "Women in America earn only 2/3 of what men do. Women artists earn only 1/3 of what men do." These early posters often targeted specific galleries and artists. Another 1985 poster listed the names of some of the most famous working artists, such as Bruce Nauman and Richard Serra. The poster asked "What do these artists have in common?" with the answer "They allow their work to be shown in galleries that show no more than 10% of women or none at all."
The group was also activists for equal representation of women in institutional art, and highlighted artist Louise Bourgeois in their "Advantages to Being a Women artist", poster in 1988 as one line read, "Knowing your career might not pick up till after you're 80." Their pieces are also notable for their use of combative statements such as "When racism and sexism are no longer fashionable, what will your art collection be worth?"
"Dearest Art Collector" is a 560x430 mm screen-print on paper. This is one of thirty posters published in a portfolio entitled "Guerrilla Girls Talk Back". This print is unusual in the portfolio in that it takes the form of an enlarged handwritten letter on baby pink paper. The extremely rounded cursive script crowned with a frowning flower exudes femininity, symbolizing the biting sarcasm for which the Guerrilla Girls were known. The Guerrilla Girls sent this poster to well-known art collectors across the United States, pointing out how few works they owned by women artists. This send-up of femininity is aimed at the expectation that, even when presenting a serious complaint, women should do so in a socially acceptable 'nice' way. "We know that you feel terrible about this" appeals to the feelings of the recipient. This piece was a commentary on how hard it is for female artists, and what lengths they must go through in order to be recognized and taken seriously. Women are constantly expected to perform a certain way and this print is the embodiment of how tumultuous it is for women all around the world to be recognized in the eyes of men with power. The group later transcribed it into other languages and sent it to collectors outside the U.S. A practical joke with serious implications, this poster is now a collector's item.
The posters were rude; they named names and they printed statistics. They embarrassed people. In other words, they worked.
The Guerrilla Girls' first color poster, which remains the group's most iconic image, is the 1989 Metropolitan Museum poster, which used data from the group's first "weenie count". In response to the overwhelming number of female nudes counted in the modern art sections, the poster asks, sarcastically, "Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum?". Next to the text is an image of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres's painting Grande Odalisque. The Guerrilla Girls placed a gorilla mask over the head of Ingres' nude, which is one of the most famous female nudes in Western art. The New York Public Art Fund had rejected the Guerrilla Girls' Metropolitan Museum poster for a billboard they had commissioned from the group. Rather than change the image, the group bought advertising space from the MTA, and the poster traversed lower Manhattan on New York City buses, until the MTA declined to renew their contract. In 2021, the Metropolitan Museum poster was donated to the Met, and in 2021–22, it was featured in the exhibition Prints: Revolution, Resistance, and Activism.
A 2005 Guerrilla Girl recount at the Met found that only 3% of the exhibited artists in the modern section were women, whereas the nude females constituted 83% of the nudes in those galleries. The 2012 Guerrilla Girl poster reported 4% women artists, and a figure of 76% female nudes, reflecting a lower percentage of women artists and female nudes from 1985. A survey of other sections of the Metropolitan Museum gives different results. Art critic Christopher Allen states that proportionately more female artists and fewer nudes are in the 18th century section, and Mary Beard writes in her 2018 book, Civilisations: How Do We Look, that it took centuries in Greek antiquity until Praxiteles created the first female nude, Aphrodite of Knidos.
In 1990, the group designed a billboard featuring the Mona Lisa that was placed along the West Side Highway supported by the New York City Public Art Fund. Stickers also became a popular calling cards representative of the group.
The Guerrilla Girls infiltrated the bathrooms of the newly opened Guggenheim Museum SoHo, placing stickers regarding female inequality on the walls. In 1998, Guerrilla Girls West protested at the San José Museum of Art, over low representation of women artists.
In addition to researching and exposing sexism in the art world, the Guerrilla Girls have received commissions from numerous organizations and institutions, such as The Nation, Fundación Bilbao Arte, Istanbul Modern and Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art. They have also partnered with Amnesty International, contributing pieces to a show under the organization's "Protect the Human" initiative.
They were interviewed for the film !Women Art Revolution.
In 1987, the Guerrilla Girls published thirty posters in a portfolio entitled Guerrilla Girls Talk Back. One specifically, We Sell White Bread, was a poster made to gradually widen their focus, tackling issues of racial discrimination in the art world and also making more direct, politicized interventions. In 1987, the image on this poster was first seen as peel-off stickers on gallery windows and doors in New York. Its medium, screen print on paper, has the words "We Sell White Bread" and are stamped on a slice of white bread alongside a list of ingredients that includes the white male artists whose work is on display at the galleries. According to the poster, the galleries favored white, male artists, noting that the gallery "contains less than the minimum daily requirement of white women and non-whites".