Guerrilla Girls
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Guerrilla Girls is an anonymous group of
feminist Feminism is a range of socio-political movements and ideology, ideologies that aim to define and establish the political, economic, personal, and social gender equality, equality of the sexes. Feminism holds the position that modern soci ...
, female artists devoted to fighting
sexism Sexism is prejudice or discrimination based on one's sex or gender. Sexism can affect anyone, but primarily affects women and girls. It has been linked to gender roles and stereotypes, and may include the belief that one sex or gender is int ...
and
racism Racism is the belief that groups of humans possess different behavioral traits corresponding to inherited attributes and can be divided based on the superiority of one Race (human categorization), race or ethnicity over another. It may also me ...
within the
art world The art world comprises everyone involved in producing, commissioning, presenting, preserving, promoting, chronicling, criticizing, buying and selling fine art. It is recognized that there are many art worlds, defined either by location or alt ...
. 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 Gender is the range of social, psychological, cultural, and behavioral aspects of being a man (or boy), woman (or girl), or third gender. Although gender often corresponds to sex, a transgender person may identify with a gender other tha ...
and
racial inequality Social inequality occurs when resources within a society are distributed unevenly, often as a result of inequitable allocation practices that create distinct unequal patterns based on socially defined categories of people. Differences in acce ...
into focus within the greater arts community and society at large. The Guerrilla Girls employ
culture jamming Culture jamming (sometimes also guerrilla communication) is a form of protest used by many anti-consumerist social movements to disrupt or subvert media culture and its mainstream cultural institutions, including corporate advertising. It at ...
in the form of posters, books, billboards, lectures, interviews, public appearances and internet interventions to expose disparities, discrimination, and corruption (the latter includes conflicts of interest within museums). 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 Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón (; 6 July 1907 – 13 July 1954) was a Mexican painter known for her many portraits, self-portraits, and works inspired by the nature and artifacts of Mexico. Inspired by Culture of Mexico, the country' ...
,
Käthe Kollwitz Käthe Kollwitz ( born Schmidt; 8 July 186722 April 1945) was a German artist who worked with painting, printmaking (including etching, lithography and woodcuts) and sculpture. Her most famous art cycles, including ''The Weavers'' and ''The Peasa ...
, and Alice Neel, as well as writers and activists, such as
Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein (February 3, 1874 – July 27, 1946) was an American novelist, poet, playwright, and art collector. Born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania (now part of Pittsburgh), and raised in Oakland, California, Stein moved to Paris in 1903, and ...
and
Harriet Tubman Harriet Tubman (born Araminta Ross, – March 10, 1913) was an American abolitionist and social activist. After escaping slavery, Tubman made some 13 missions to rescue approximately 70 enslaved people, including her family and friends, us ...
. 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 The Metropolitan Museum of Art, colloquially referred to as the Met, is an Encyclopedic museum, encyclopedic art museum in New York City. By floor area, it is the List of largest museums, third-largest museum in the world and the List of larg ...
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 The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on 53rd Street (Manhattan), 53rd Street between Fifth Avenue, Fifth and Sixth Avenues. MoMA's collection spans the late 19th century to the present, a ...
's exhibition "An International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture" (1984), 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 (one account puts the number at eight), and none of them were women. Comments attributed to the show's curator,
Kynaston McShine Kynaston Leigh Gerard McShine (February 20, 1935 – January 8, 2018) was a Trinidadian born curator and public speaker. His visions about contemporary art made lasting contributions to the lives of countless artists and colleagues at the Museum ...
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 ''The New York Times'' (''NYT'') is an American daily newspaper based in New York City. ''The New York Times'' covers domestic, national, and international news, and publishes opinion pieces, investigative reports, and reviews. As one of ...
'' 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 SoHo, short for "South of Houston Street, Houston Street", is a neighborhood in Lower Manhattan, New York City. Since the 1970s, the neighborhood has been the location of many artists' lofts and art galleries, art installations such as The Wall ...
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
Guerrilla Guerrilla warfare is a form of unconventional warfare in which small groups of irregular military, such as rebels, Partisan (military), partisans, paramilitary personnel or armed civilians, which may include Children in the military, recruite ...
s before we were
Gorilla Gorillas are primarily herbivorous, terrestrial great apes that inhabit the tropical forests of equatorial Africa. The genus ''Gorilla'' is divided into two species: the eastern gorilla and the western gorilla, and either four or five su ...
s. 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 An interview is a structured conversation where one participant asks questions, and the other provides answers.Merriam Webster DictionaryInterview Dictionary definition, Retrieved February 16, 2016 In common parlance, the word "interview" re ...
'' 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 In sociology, tokenism is the social practice of making a perfunctory and symbolic effort towards the equitable inclusion of members of a minority group, especially by recruiting people from under-represented social-minority groups in order for th ...
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 Lucy Rowland Lippard (born April 14, 1937) is an American writer, art critic, activist, and curator. Lippard was among the first writers to argue for the " dematerialization" at work in conceptual art and was an early champion of feminist art. ...
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.Chave, Anna C. "The Guerrilla Girls' Reckoning." ''Art Journal'' 70.2 (2011): 102–11. Web. 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 The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on 53rd Street (Manhattan), 53rd Street between Fifth Avenue, Fifth and Sixth Avenues. MoMA's collection spans the late 19th century to the present, a ...
could ignore 200 protestors from the
Women's Caucus for Art The Women's Caucus for Art (WCA), founded in 1972, is a non-profit organization based in New York City, which supports women artists, art historians, students, educators, and museum professionals. The WCA holds exhibitions and conferences to promo ...
. "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 (mostly posters at first) 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 Word art or text art is a form of art that includes text, forming words or phrases, as its main component; it is a combination of language and visual imagery. Overview There are two main types of word art: *One uses words or phrases because of ...
. 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 A flyer (or flier) is a form of paper advertisement intended for wide distribution and typically posted or distributed in a public place, handed out to individuals or sent through the mail. Today, flyers range from inexpensively photocopied lea ...
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 Bruce Nauman (born December 6, 1941) is an American artist. His practice spans a broad range of media including sculpture, photography, neon, video, drawing, printmaking, and performance. Nauman lives near Galisteo, New Mexico. Life and work ...
and
Richard Serra Richard Serra (November 2, 1938 – March 26, 2024) was an American artist known for his large-scale Abstract art, abstract sculptures made for Site-specific art, site-specific landscape, urban, and Architecture, architectural settings, a ...
. 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 Louise Joséphine Bourgeois (; 25 December 191131 May 2010) was a French-American artist. Although she is best known for her large-scale sculpture and installation art, Bourgeois was also a prolific painter and printmaker. She explored a varie ...
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" (1986) 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 (somewhat ironically) a collector's item.
The posters were rude; they named names and they printed statistics (and almost always cited the source of those statistics at the bottom, making them difficult to dismiss). 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 Modern art includes artistic work produced during the period extending roughly from the 1860s to the 1970s, and denotes the styles and philosophies of the art produced during that era. The term is usually associated with art in which the tradit ...
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 Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres ( ; ; 29 August 1780 – 14 January 1867) was a French Neoclassicism, Neoclassical Painting, painter. Ingres was profoundly influenced by past artistic traditions and aspired to become the guardian of academic ...
's painting '' Grande Odalisque'' (1814, Louvre Museum). 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 (evidently because they thought the fan handle looked phallic). 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 A billboard (also called a hoarding in the UK and many other parts of the world) is a large outdoor advertising structure (a billing board), typically found in high-traffic areas such as alongside busy roads. Billboards present large advertis ...
featuring the
Mona Lisa The ''Mona Lisa'' is a half-length portrait painting by the Italian artist Leonardo da Vinci. Considered an archetypal masterpiece of the Italian Renaissance, it has been described as "the best known, the most visited, the most written about, ...
that was placed along the
West Side Highway The Joe DiMaggio Highway, commonly called the West Side Highway and formerly the Miller Highway, is a mostly surface section of New York State Route 9A (NY 9A), running from 72nd Street (Manhattan), West 72nd Street along the Hudso ...
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 ''The Nation'' is a progressive American monthly magazine that covers political and cultural news, opinion, and analysis. It was founded on July 6, 1865, as a successor to William Lloyd Garrison's '' The Liberator'', an abolitionist newspaper ...
(2001), Fundación Bilbao Arte (2002), Istanbul Modern (2006) and
Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art Witte (and de Witte) are Dutch language, Dutch and Low German surnames meaning "(the) white one". Witte can also be a patronymic surname. Notable people with the surname include: * Alfred Witte (1878–1941), German astrologer * Barbara Witte (192 ...
(2007). They have also partnered with
Amnesty International Amnesty International (also referred to as Amnesty or AI) is an international non-governmental organization focused on human rights, with its headquarters in the United Kingdom. The organization says that it has more than ten million members a ...
, 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 Racial discrimination is any discrimination against any individual on the basis of their Race (human categorization), race, ancestry, ethnicity, ethnic or national origin, and/or Human skin color, skin color and Hair, hair texture. Individuals ...
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".


Public commissions

In 2005, the group exhibited large-format posters ''Welcome to the Feminist Biennale'' at the
Venice Biennale The Venice Biennale ( ; ) is an international cultural exhibition hosted annually in Venice, Italy. There are two main components of the festival, known as the Art Biennale () and the Venice Biennale of Architecture, Architecture Biennale (), ...
(the first in 110 years to be overseen by women), scrutinizing 101 years of Biennale history in terms of diversity. ''Where Are the Women Artists of Venice?'' explored the fact that most works owned by Venice's historical museums are kept in storage. Since 2005, the Guerrilla Girls have been invited to produce special projects for international institutions, sometimes for the very institutions, they have criticized. Offers that pose a dilemma are carefully considered, so as to avoid censure since one way to improve institutions is to criticize them from inside. Their 2006 poster ''The Future for Turkish Women Artists as Revealed by the Guerrilla Girls'', commissioned by İstanbul Modern, demonstrated that the status of women artists in Turkey was better than in the rest of Europe. In 2007, ''
The Washington Post ''The Washington Post'', locally known as ''The'' ''Post'' and, informally, ''WaPo'' or ''WP'', is an American daily newspaper published in Washington, D.C., the national capital. It is the most widely circulated newspaper in the Washington m ...
'' published their "Horror on the National Mall!", a one-page newspaper spread attacking the absence of diversity among tax-payer supported museums on the Mall in Washington, DC. During the 2007 ART-ATHINA, the Guerrilla Girls projected "Dear Art Collector" in Greek onto the entrance's façade. In 2015, they projected their "Dear Art Collector" animation onto a museum façade, taking on collectors who fail to pay employees a living wage. To commemorate the 20th Anniversary of the
École Polytechnique massacre École or Ecole may refer to: * an elementary school in the French educational stages normally followed by secondary education establishments (collège and lycée) * École (river), a tributary of the Seine flowing in région Île-de-France * Éco ...
, the University of Quebec commissioned their ''Troubler Le Repos'' (Disturbing The Peace) poster, whose texts addressed anti-women
hate speech Hate speech is a term with varied meaning and has no single, consistent definition. It is defined by the ''Cambridge Dictionary'' as "public speech that expresses hate or encourages violence towards a person or group based on something such as ...
since
Ancient Greece Ancient Greece () was a northeastern Mediterranean civilization, existing from the Greek Dark Ages of the 12th–9th centuries BC to the end of classical antiquity (), that comprised a loose collection of culturally and linguistically r ...
to
Rush Limbaugh Rush Hudson Limbaugh III ( ; January 12, 1951 – February 17, 2021) was an American Conservatism in the United States, conservative political commentator who was the host of ''The Rush Limbaugh Show'', which first aired in 1984 and was nati ...
. In 2009, they launched ''I'm not a feminist, but If I were this is what I'd complain about ... '', an interactive graffiti wall that enables women who don't see themselves as feminists the means to target gender issues with the hope that active participation will broaden their perspectives. In 2012, this traveled to Krakòw's Art Boom Festival. In 2011, Columbia College Chicago's Glass Curtain Gallery and Institute for Women and Gender in the Arts and Media commissioned the first Guerrilla Girls survey of Chicago museums. The resulting banner entitled ''Chicago Museums uerrilla Girls to Museums: Time for Gender Reassignment!' critiqued gender disparity in the contemporary art collections of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Contemporary Art. In 2012, an advertising truck towed ''Do women Have To Be Naked To Get into Boston Museums?'' around Boston. Invited by
Yoko Ono Yoko Ono (, usually spelled in katakana as ; born February 18, 1933) is a Japanese multimedia artist, singer, songwriter, and peace activist. Her work also encompasses performance art and filmmaking. Ono grew up in Tokyo and moved to New York ...
to participate in the 2013 Meltdown Festival, the Guerrilla Girls updated their 2003 ''Estrogen Bomb'' poster, which had premiered in
The Village Voice ''The Village Voice'' is an American news and culture publication based in Greenwich Village, New York City, known for being the country's first Alternative newspaper, alternative newsweekly. Founded in 1955 by Dan Wolf (publisher), Dan Wolf, ...
in 2003. During Winter 2016, they participated in "Twin City Takeover", art exhibitions and art projects organized by a consortium of local art organizations sited around Minneapolis and St. Paul. In 1996 Guerrilla Girls came out with Planet Pussy in Monkey Business issue #4 in November 1996. This was a work about feminism and was published by Sike Burmeister and Sabine Schmidt.


Film world

To protest the lack of female directors, the Guerrilla Girls distributed stickers during the 2001
Sundance Film Festival The Sundance Film Festival is an annual film festival organized by the Sundance Institute. It is the largest independent film festival in the United States, with 423,234 combined in-person and online viewership in 2023. The festival has acted ...
.
The Nation ''The Nation'' is a progressive American monthly magazine that covers political and cultural news, opinion, and analysis. It was founded on July 6, 1865, as a successor to William Lloyd Garrison's '' The Liberator'', an abolitionist newspaper ...
invited them to present ''Birth of Feminism'', which they updated and presented in 2007 as a banner outside Witte de With Center for Contemporary Arts. Since 2002, Guerrilla Girls Inc. have designed and installed billboards during the Oscars that address white male dominance in the
film industry The film industry or motion picture industry comprises the technological and commercial institutions of filmmaking, i.e., film production company, production companies, film studios, cinematography, animation, film production, screenwriting, pre- ...
, such as: "Anatomically Correct Oscars", "Even the Senate is More Progressive than Hollywood", "The Birth of Feminism", "Unchain the Women Directors". During the 2015
Reykjavík Arts Festival The Reykjavík Arts Festival is an art festival that takes place in Reykjavík every other year. It was founded in 1970 and was biennial from the beginning, but in the years 2005–2016 it was held annually. Since 2016, the festival has again beco ...
, the Guerrilla Girls displayed ''National Film Quiz'', a billboard criticizing the fact that 87% of national funding for films goes to men, despite women playing an important part of Iceland's public and private sectors. In light of 2016's #Oscarssowhite campaign, the Guerrilla Girls updated the above billboards, presenting them on downtown Minneapolis streets for "Twin City Takeover". In 2023, the Guerrilla Girls were featured in the episode "Bodies of Knowledge of the American streaming series Art in the Twenty-First Century, season 11., in which they presented a new body of work.


Politics and social issues

Although the Guerrilla Girls' protest art directed at the art world remains their most well-known work, throughout their existence the group has periodically targeted politicians, specifically conservative Republicans. Those criticized have included George Bush,
Newt Gingrich Newton Leroy Gingrich (; né McPherson; born June 17, 1943) is an American politician and author who served as the List of speakers of the United States House of Representatives, 50th speaker of the United States House of Representatives from 1 ...
, and most recently
Michele Bachmann Michele Marie Bachmann (; née Amble; born April 6, 1956) is an American politician who was the United States House of Representatives, U.S. representative for from 2007 until 2015. A member of the Republican Party (United States), Republican P ...
. In 1991, the Artist and Homeless Collaborative invited them to work with homeless women to create posters in response to homelessness and the first
Gulf War , combatant2 = , commander1 = , commander2 = , strength1 = Over 950,000 soldiers3,113 tanks1,800 aircraft2,200 artillery systems , page = https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GAOREPORTS-PEMD-96- ...
. Between 1992 and 1994, Guerrilla Girl posters addressed the 1992 presidential election,
reproductive rights Reproductive rights are legal rights and freedoms relating to human reproduction, reproduction and reproductive health that vary amongst countries around the world. The World Health Organization defines reproductive rights: Reproductive rights ...
(done for the march on Washington in 1992), gay and lesbian rights, and the
1992 Los Angeles riots The 1992 Los Angeles riots were a series of riots and civil disturbances that occurred in Los Angeles County, California, United States, during April and May 1992. Unrest began in South Los Angeles, South Central Los Angeles on April 29, after ...
. During the 2012 election, they displayed their ''Even Michele Bachman believes. ... '' on a billboard adjacent to a football stadium to advertise her plan to: ban same-sex marriages, require voter ID checks, and spend money implementing statewide voter IDs. Their 2013 posters discussed the Homeland Terror Alert system and Arnold Schwarzenegger's gubernatorial campaign. In 2016, the Guerrilla Girls launched the "President Trump Announces New Commemorative Months" campaign in the form of stickers and posters, which they distributed during the Women's March on Washington in Los Angeles and New York City, as well as the J20 event at the Whitney Museum of Art and the Fire Fink protest at MoMA.


Work: publications and merchandise

To shed light on inequality in the art world, the Guerrilla Girls have published numerous books. In 1995, they published their first book, ''Confessions of the Guerrilla Girls'', a compilation of 50 works plus a self-interview. In 1998, they published ''The Guerrilla Girls Bedside Companion to the History of Western Art'', a consciousness-raising comic book that sold 82,000 copies, as it explores how art history's male domination constrained several female artists' careers. In 2003, they published ''Bitches, Bimbos and Ballbreakers'', a down and dirty catalogue of "The Top Stereotypes from Cradle to Grave". Offering thumbnail histories for cultural clichés ranging from "Daddy's Girl", "the Girl Next Door", "the Bimbo/Dumb Blonde" to "the Bitch/Ballbreaker", each is given "trademark Guerrilla Girl treatment: pointed factoids and cool graphics". Their 2004 book ''The Guerrilla Girl's Museum Activity Book'' (reissued in 2012) parodies children's museum activity books. Meant to teach children how to both appreciate and critique museums, this book provides activities that reveal the problematic aspects of museum culture and major museum collections. In 2009, they produced a history of hysteria, ''The Hysterical Herstory Of Hysteria And How It Was Cured From Ancient Times Until Now''. MFC-Michèle Didier published it in 2016.


Presentations

An important part of Guerrilla Girls' outreach since 1985 has been presentations and workshops at colleges, universities, art organizations, and sometimes at museums. The presentations, known as "gigs", attract hundreds and sometimes thousands of attendees. In the gig, they play music, videos, show slides and talk about the history of their work, how it has evolved. In the end, the GGs interact with audience members. New work is always included and gig material changes all the time. They have done hundreds of these events and have traveled to nearly every state as well as Europe, South America, and Australia. In recognition of their work, the Guerrilla Girls have been invited to give talks at world-renowned museums, including a presentation at the MoMA's 2007 "Feminist Futures" Symposium. They have also been invited to speak at art schools and universities across the globe and gave a 2010 commencement speech at the
School of the Art Institute of Chicago The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) is a Private university, private art school associated with the Art Institute of Chicago (AIC) in Chicago, Illinois. Tracing its history to an art students' cooperative founded in 1866, which gr ...
. To mark the 30th anniversary of the Guerrilla Girls, Matadero Madrid hosted "Guerrilla Girls: 1985–2015", an exhibition featuring most of the collective's production accompanied by a series of events including a talk/performance by Guerrilla Girl members Frida Kahlo and Käthe Kollwitz. The exhibition also showed the 1992 documentary "Guerrilla in Our Midst" by Amy Harrison. Three Guerrilla Girls appeared on the Stephen Colbert show on January 14, 2016.


Exhibitions

Early solo exhibitions included: "The Night the Palladium Apologized" (1985),
Palladium (New York City) The Palladium (originally called the Academy of Music) was a movie theatre, concert hall, and finally a nightclub in New York City. It was located on the south side of East 14th Street, between Irving Place and Third Avenue. Designed by ...
; "Guerrilla Girls Review the Whitney" (1987), Clocktower PS1; and "Guerrilla Girls" (1995), Printed Matter, Inc. Career surveys include: *"Guerrilla Girls Talk Back: The First Five Years, A Retrospective: 1985–1990" (1991), the Falkirk Cultural Center,
San Rafael, California San Rafael ( ; Spanish language, Spanish for "Raphael (archangel), St. Raphael", ) is a city in and the county seat of Marin County, California, United States. The city is located in the North Bay (San Francisco Bay Area), North Bay region of th ...
*"Guerrilla Girls: 1985–2013", Azkuna Zentroa (2013). *"Guerrilla Girls: Retrospective" (2009), Millennium Court Arts Centre, UK *"Feminist Masked Avengers: 30 Early Guerrilla Girls' Posters" (2011)
Mason Gross School of the Arts Mason Gross School of the Arts ("Mason Gross" or "MGSA") is the arts conservatory at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Mason Gross offers undergraduate and graduate degrees in art, design, dance, filmmaking, music, and theater. Ma ...
Galleries *"Guerrilla Girls" (2007), Hellenic American Union Galleries, Athens, GR *"Not Ready to Make Nice: The Guerrilla Girls in the Art World and Beyond"
Columbia College Chicago Columbia College Chicago is a Private college, private art college in Chicago, Illinois, United States. Founded in 1890, it has 6,493 students (as of fall 2021) pursuing degrees in more than 60 undergraduate and graduate degree programs. It i ...
(2012–2017) Traveled to Monserrat College of Art;
Krannert Art Museum The Krannert Art Museum (KAM) is a fine art museum located at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in Champaign, Illinois, United States. It has of space devoted to all periods of art, dating from ancient Egypt to contemporary photography ...
;
Fairfield University Fairfield University is a private university, private Society of Jesus, Jesuit university in Fairfield, Connecticut. It was founded by the Jesuits in 1942. In 2023, the university had about 5,000 full-time undergraduate students and 1,200 gra ...
;
Georgia Museum of Art Georgia most commonly refers to: * Georgia (country), a country in the South Caucasus * Georgia (U.S. state), a state in the southeastern United States Georgia may also refer to: People and fictional characters * Georgia (name), a list of pe ...
;
DePauw University DePauw University ( ) is a private liberal arts college in Greencastle, Indiana, United States. It was founded in 1837 as Indiana Asbury College and changed its name to DePauw University in 1884. The college has a Methodist heritage and was ...
; North Michigan University:
Stony Brook University Stony Brook University (SBU), officially the State University of New York at Stony Brook, is a public university, public research university in Stony Brook, New York, United States, on Long Island. Along with the University at Buffalo, it is on ...
: California State University: The Verge Center for the Arts: and Moore College for Art and Design. *"The Guerrilla Girls" (2002), Fundacíon Bilbao Arte, Bilbao, ES *"Guerrilla Girls: Takeover" (2021),
Nasher Sculpture Center Opened in 2003, the Nasher Sculpture Center is a museum in Dallas, Texas, that houses the Patsy and Raymond Nasher collection of modern and contemporary sculpture. It is located on a site adjacent to the Dallas Museum of Art in the Dal ...
, Dallas, Texas. *"Guerrilla Girls: Making Trouble" (2025) Guerrilla Girls mark their fortieth anniversary in 2025 exhibition at the National Museum of Women in the Arts On the heels of "Not Ready to Make Nice" were: *"The Male Graze: Guerilla Girls", 2021,
Museum of London London Museum (known from 1976 to 2024 as the Museum of London) is a museum in London, covering the history of the city from prehistoric to modern times, with a particular focus on social history. The Museum of London was formed in 1976 by ama ...
*"Art at the Center: Guerrilla Girls", 2016,
Walker Art Center The Walker Art Center is a multidisciplinary contemporary art center in the Lowry Hill, Minneapolis, Lowry Hill neighborhood of Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States. The Walker is one of the most-visited modern and contemporary art museums in ...
*"Front Room: Guerrilla Girls", 2016–2017,
Baltimore Museum of Art The Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) in Baltimore, Maryland, is an art museum that was founded in 1914. The BMA's collection of 95,000 objects encompasses more than 1,000 works by Henri Matisse anchored by the Cone Collection of modern art, ...
*"Guerrilla Girls: Not Ready to Make Nice, 30 Years and Still Counting", 2015,
Abrons Arts Center The Henry Street Settlement is a not-for-profit social service agency on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, New York City that provides social services, arts programs and health care services to New Yorkers of all ages. It was founded under the ...
; *"Media Networks: Andy Warhol and the Guerrilla Girls", 2016,
Tate Modern Tate Modern is an art gallery in London, housing the United Kingdom's national collection of international Modern art, modern and contemporary art (created from or after 1900). It forms part of the Tate group together with Tate Britain, Tate Live ...
* "Not Ready to Make Nice: Guerrilla Girls 1985–2016", 2016–2017, FRAC Lorraine. *"The Guerrilla Girls and La Barbe", 2016, Gallery mfc-micheledidier, Paris. * "Guerrilla Girls" The Verge Center for the Arts, Sacramento, California (2017)


Controversies


Diversity

Despite having routinely challenged art institutions to display more artists of color, both members and critics want the Guerrilla Girls to be more diverse. Their art was believed to be exclusive to white feminism and they addressed by creating a series of activist artworks addressing a range of issues that women faced. "Zora Neale Hurston" recalls Guerrilla Girl membership as "mostly white" and largely mirroring the art world demographics that they critiqued. Despite sporting gorilla masks to downplay personal identity, some members attribute Guerrilla Girl interests to the fact that de facto leaders "Frida Kahlo" and "Käthe Kollwitz" are both white. ("Frida Kahlo" has also been criticized for her appropriation of a Latina artist's name.) The artist believed in the overt artistic expression by correlating beauty and pain, along with the rise of modernism. An art movement without generalization. However, any precise information on the demographics of the Guerrilla Girls is impossible, for they have "staunchly, and problematically, resisted being surveyed as to the makeup of their own membership". Several Guerrilla Girls who are people of color have faced numerous challenges. Despite the Guerrilla Girls' stance against tokenism, some artists of color abandoned Guerrilla Girl membership due to
tokenism In sociology, tokenism is the social practice of making a perfunctory and symbolic effort towards the equitable inclusion of members of a minority group, especially by recruiting people from under-represented social-minority groups in order for th ...
, silencing, disrespect, and whitewashing. As a woman of color, "Alma Thomas" describes having felt uncomfortable wearing the Guerrilla Girls' signature gorilla mask. "Thomas" recalls little effort being devoted to understanding the challenges of artists of color. "Their whiteness was such that they ... didn't understand that blacks were being put in a completely separate world in the art world, that black male artists and black female artists are completely separated, completely segregated to this day." Ultimately, this widespread antagonism led to many "artists of color eavingafter a few meetings because they could sense the unspoken hierarchy in the group".


Second-wave feminism and essentialism

Emerging at the tail end of the second-wave feminist movement, the Guerrilla Girls navigated the differences between established and emerging feminist theory during the 1980s. "Alma Thomas" describes this grey-area that the Guerrilla Girls occupied as "universalist feminism", bordering on
essentialism Essentialism is the view that objects have a set of attributes that are necessary to their Identity (philosophy), identity. In early Western thought, Platonic idealism held that all things have such an "essence"—an Theory of forms, "idea" or "f ...
. Art historian Anna Chave considers the Guerrilla Girls' essentialism much more profound, leading the group to be "assailed by ... a rising generation of women wise in the ways of poststructuralist theory, for
heir Inheritance is the practice of receiving private property, titles, debts, entitlements, privileges, rights, and obligations upon the death of an individual. The rules of inheritance differ among societies and have changed over time. Offi ...
putative naiveté and susceptibility to essentialism". Essentialist views are most clearly exhibited in two Guerrilla Girl books:''The Guerrilla Girls Bedside Companion to the History of Western Art'' (1998) and the controversial ''Estrogen Bomb'' (2003–13) campaign. Regarding the former, "Alma Thomas" worried that ''The Guerrilla Girls Bedside Companion to the History of Western Art'' "was so embedded in that second-wave feminist and even pre-second-wave essentialism" that it fulfilled some assumption that all women artists are feminist artists. Students at Minneapolis College of Art and Design criticized their ''Estrogen Bomb'' poster campaign, describing it as insensitive towards transgender people since it ties the female gender to estrogen, the same sort of essentialist link the Guerrilla Girls aim to critique. Aside from essentialism, the Guerrilla Girls have also been critiqued for failing to integrate
intersectionality Intersectionality is an analytical framework for understanding how groups' and individuals' social and political identities result in unique combinations of discrimination and privilege. Examples of these intersecting and overlapping factor ...
into their work.


Internal disputes

Leading up to a highly publicized 2003 lawsuit, there was increasing animosity toward "Frida Kahlo" and "Käthe Kollwitz". Despite founding members' initial intention to create a non-hierarchal, equitable power structure, there was an increasing sense that two people were making "the final decisions no matter what you said". Several Guerrilla Girls felt that their second book, ''The Guerrilla Girls Bedside Companion to the History of Western Art'', primarily represented the views of "Kahlo" and "Kollwitz". Some even felt that "Kahlo" and "Kollwitz" completely controlled the book, despite their having selected material created collectively by all Guerrilla Girls. There was even suspicion that these two not only claimed all the credit but took all of the profits. Some members condemned the book as "undemocratic and ... against the spirit of the uerrillaGirls". As the Guerilla Girls gained in popularity, tensions led to what the Girls later called the "banana split", as five members actually split from the collective. Soon after several members stepped aside to form Guerrilla Girls Broadband, "Kahlo" and "Kollwitz" moved to trademark the name "Guerrilla Girls, Inc." to distinguish their realm from those of Guerrilla Girls BroadBand and Guerrilla Girls On Tour! whose focus is discrimination in the theater world. Even though their former colleague "Gertrude Stein" was in the on-tour group, "Kahlo" and "Kollwitz" charged them with copyright and trademark infringement and unjust enrichment. Many members of the group felt especially betrayed that "Kahlo" and "Kollwitz" had launched their lawsuit under their real names, Jerilea Zempel and
Erika Rothenberg Erika Rothenberg is a Los Angeles–based conceptual artist whose work has included painting, drawing and photography, public art, sculpture and installation art, installation.Freudenheim, Susan"Casting a cold eye...,"''Los Angeles Times'', Mar ...
. Jeffrey Toobin. "Girls Behaving Badly", ''
The New Yorker ''The New Yorker'' is an American magazine featuring journalism, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons, and poetry. It was founded on February 21, 1925, by Harold Ross and his wife Jane Grant, a reporter for ''The New York T ...
''. May 30, 2005.
This prompted negative reactions from both current and former Guerrilla Girls, who objected to "Kahlo" and "Kollwitz" claiming responsibility for having created the collective effort, as well as the flippancy with which they exchanged their anonymity for legal standing. Judge Louis L. Stanton, who handled the case, rejected the "bizarre" suggestion that defendants sporting gorilla masks be allowed to testify in his courtroom. He also stated that "Mundane court procedures for adjudicating legal rights and the ownership of property require direct and cross-examination of real persons with real addresses and attributes." In their 45-page complaint, "Kahlo" and "Kollwitz" described themselves as the group's "guiding forces", even though the Guerrilla Girls were "informally organized, ndhad no official hierarchy". Initially, they asked the court to stop Guerrilla Girls Broadband from calling themselves Guerrilla Girls and sought millions of dollars in damages. In 2006, they settled with the theatre group who agreed to go by Guerrilla Girls on Tour. As of 2013, three separate groups remained active, the GuerrillaGirlsBroadBand, Inc., Guerrilla Girls On Tour, Inc. (the Theatre Girls), and Guerrilla Girls, Inc. The Guerrilla Girls BroadBand focuses on the internet as its "natural habitat".


Selling out

Upon their 1985 debut, the Guerrilla Girls were "lauded by the very establishment they sought to undermine". They have since exhibited at Tate Modern, Venice Biennale, Centre Pompidou, and MoMA, which additionally grants them a broader audience for their concerns. Since then, this relationship has only intensified, as the Guerrilla Girls presented their exhibitions in museums and even allowed their works to be collected by hegemonic institutions. Although some have questioned the efficacy, if not hypocrisy, of the group's working within the system that they originally denigrated, few would challenge their decision to let the
Getty Research Institute The Getty Research Institute (GRI), located at the Getty Center in Los Angeles, California, is "dedicated to furthering knowledge and advancing understanding of the visual arts".
house their archives.


Members and names

Membership in the New York City group is exclusive, by invitation only, based on relationships with current and past members, and one's involvement in the
contemporary art Contemporary art is a term used to describe the art of today, generally referring to art produced from the 1970s onwards. Contemporary artists work in a globally influenced, culturally diverse, and technologically advancing world. Their art is a ...
world. A
mentoring Mentorship is the patronage, influence, guidance, or direction given by a mentor. A mentor is someone who teaches or gives help and advice to a less experienced and often younger person. In an organizational setting, a mentor influences the perso ...
program was formed within the group, pairing a new member with an experienced Guerrilla Girl to bring them into the fold. Due to the lack of formality, the group is comfortable with individuals outside of their base claiming to be Guerrilla Girls; Guerrilla Girl 1 stated in a 2007 interview: "It can only enhance us by having people of power who have been given credit for being a Girl, even if they were never a Girl." Men are not allowed to become Guerrilla Girls but may support the group by assisting in promotional activities. Guerrilla Girls' names are
pseudonyms A pseudonym (; ) or alias () is a fictitious name that a person assumes for a particular purpose, which differs from their original or true meaning (orthonym). This also differs from a new name that entirely or legally replaces an individual's ow ...
generally based on dead female artists. Members go by names such as
Käthe Kollwitz Käthe Kollwitz ( born Schmidt; 8 July 186722 April 1945) was a German artist who worked with painting, printmaking (including etching, lithography and woodcuts) and sculpture. Her most famous art cycles, including ''The Weavers'' and ''The Peasa ...
, Alma Thomas,
Rosalba Carriera Rosalba Carriera (12 January 1673 – 15 April 1757) was an Italians, Italian Rococo painter. In her younger years, she specialized in portrait miniatures. Carriera would later become known for her pastel portraits, helping popularize the medium ...
,
Frida Kahlo Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón (; 6 July 1907 – 13 July 1954) was a Mexican painter known for her many portraits, self-portraits, and works inspired by the nature and artifacts of Mexico. Inspired by Culture of Mexico, the country' ...
, Alice Neel,
Julia de Burgos Julia Constanza Burgos García (February 17, 1914 – July 6, 1953), known as Julia de Burgos, was a Puerto Ricans, Puerto Rican poet, journalist, Independence movement in Puerto Rico, Puerto Rican independence advocate, and teacher. As an advo ...
, and
Hannah Höch Hannah Höch (; 1 November 1889 – 31 May 1978) was a German Dada artist. She is best known for her work of the Weimar Republic, Weimar period, when she was one of the originators of photomontage. Photomontage, or fotomontage, is a type of collag ...
. Guerrilla Girls' "Carriera" is credited with the idea of using pseudonyms as a way to not forget female artists. Having read about Rosalba Carriera in a footnote of ''Letters on Cézanne'' by
Rainer Maria Rilke René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke (4 December 1875 – 29 December 1926), known as Rainer Maria Rilke, was an Austrian poet and novelist. Acclaimed as an Idiosyncrasy, idiosyncratic and expressive poet, he is widely recognized as ...
, she decided to pay tribute to the little-known female artist with her name. This also helped to solve the problem of media interviews; the group was often interviewed by phone and would not give names, causing problems and confusion amongst the group and the media. Guerrilla Girl 1 joined in the late 1980s, taking on her name as a way to memorialize women in the art community who have fallen under the radar and did not make as notable as an impact as the names takes on by other members. For some members like "Zora Neale Hurston", or Emma Amos, identities have only been made public posthumously.


Gorilla symbolism

The idea to adopt the gorilla as the group's symbol stemmed from a spelling error. One of the first Guerrilla Girls accidentally spelled the group's name at a meeting as "gorilla". Despite the fact that the idea of using a gorilla as a group symbol might have been accidental, the choice is nevertheless pertinent to the group's overall message in several key ways. To begin with, the gorilla in popular culture and media is often associated with
King Kong King Kong, also referred to simply as Kong, is a fictional giant monster resembling a gorilla, who has appeared in various media since 1933. The character has since become an international pop culture icon,Erb, Cynthia, 1998, ''Tracking Kin ...
, or other images of trapped and tamed apes. In the 2010 SAIC Commencement, the comparison between institutionalized artists and tamed apes was explicitly made:
And last, but not least, be a great ape. In 1917,
Franz Kafka Franz Kafka (3 July 1883 – 3 June 1924) was a novelist and writer from Prague who was Jewish, Austrian, and Czech and wrote in German. He is widely regarded as a major figure of 20th-century literature. His work fuses elements of Litera ...
wrote a short story titled " A Report to an Academy", in which an ape spoke about what it was like to be taken into captivity by a bunch of educated, intellectual types. The published story ends with the ape tamed and broken by the stultified academics. But in an earlier draft, Kafka tells a different story. The ape ends his report by instructing other apes NOT to allow themselves to be tamed. He says instead: break the bars of your cages, bite a hole through them, squeeze through an opening ... and ask yourself where do YOU want to go
The gorilla is also typically associated with
masculinity Masculinity (also called manhood or manliness) is a set of attributes, behaviors, and roles generally associated with men and boys. Masculinity can be theoretically understood as Social construction of gender, socially constructed, and there i ...
. The Met Museum poster is in part shocking because of its juxtaposition of the eroticized female odalisque body, and the large, snarling gorilla head. The addition of the head detracts from the male gaze and changes the way in which viewers are able to look at or understand the highly sexualized image. Further, the addition of the gorilla questions and modifies stereotypical notions of female beauty within Western art and popular culture, another stated goal of the Guerrilla Girls.
Guerrilla Girls, who wear the masks of big, hairy, powerful jungle creatures whose beauty is hardly conventional ... believe all animals, large and small, are beautiful in their own way.
Though this goal has never been explicitly stated by the group, in the history of Western art, primates have often been associated with the visual arts, and with the figure of the artist. The idea of ''ars simia naturae'' ("art the ape of nature") maintains that the job of art is to "ape", or faithfully copy and represent nature. This was an idea first popularized by Renaissance thinker
Giovanni Boccaccio Giovanni Boccaccio ( , ; ; 16 June 1313 – 21 December 1375) was an Italian people, Italian writer, poet, correspondent of Petrarch, and an important Renaissance humanism, Renaissance humanist. Born in the town of Certaldo, he became so ...
who alleged that "the artist in imitating nature only follows Nature's own command".


Legacy

The group Ridykeulous overwrote the 1988 Gorilla Girls' poster ''The Advantages of Being a Woman Artist'' with their own messages in 2007.


Notable collections

*
Art Institute of Chicago The Art Institute of Chicago, founded in 1879, is one of the oldest and largest art museums in the United States. The museum is based in the Art Institute of Chicago Building in Chicago's Grant Park (Chicago), Grant Park. Its collection, stewa ...
, Chicago, Illinois *
Center for the Study of Political Graphics The Center for the Study of Political Graphics (CSPG) is a United States non-profit, educational and research archive that collects, preserves, documents, and circulates domestic and international political posters relating to historical and conte ...
, Culver City, California * Fales Library and Special Collections,
New York University New York University (NYU) is a private university, private research university in New York City, New York, United States. Chartered in 1831 by the New York State Legislature, NYU was founded in 1832 by Albert Gallatin as a Nondenominational ...
, New York City * Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Madison, WI *
Museum of Modern Art The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on 53rd Street (Manhattan), 53rd Street between Fifth Avenue, Fifth and Sixth Avenues. MoMA's collection spans the late 19th century to the present, a ...
, New York City *
Tate Tate is an institution that houses, in a network of four art galleries, the United Kingdom's national collection of British art, and international modern and contemporary art. It is not a government institution, but its main sponsor is the UK ...
, United Kingdom *
Walker Art Center The Walker Art Center is a multidisciplinary contemporary art center in the Lowry Hill, Minneapolis, Lowry Hill neighborhood of Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States. The Walker is one of the most-visited modern and contemporary art museums in ...
, Minneapolis, Minnesota *
Whitney Museum of American Art The Whitney Museum of American Art, known informally as "The Whitney", is a Modern art, modern and Contemporary art, contemporary American art museum located in the Meatpacking District, Manhattan, Meatpacking District and West Village neighbor ...
, New York City


Other notable exhibitions

*''Beyond the Streets'', 2018, Los Angeles *''Guerrilla Girls Review the Whitney'', 1987, The Clocktower, New York City *''Guerrilla Girls: Exposición Retrospectiva'', 2013, Alhóndiga Bilbao, Bilbao, Spain *''Guerrilla Girls: Not Ready to Make Nice, 30 Years and Still Counting'', Abron Arts Center, New York City *''Media Networks: Andy Warhol and the Guerrilla Girls'', (display), 2016,
Tate Modern Tate Modern is an art gallery in London, housing the United Kingdom's national collection of international Modern art, modern and contemporary art (created from or after 1900). It forms part of the Tate group together with Tate Britain, Tate Live ...
, London, United Kingdom *''Not Ready to Make Nice: Guerrilla Girls in the Artworld and Beyond'', 2012–2017, Columbia College Chicago, Chicago Illinois (traveled to 10 additional venues around the US) *''GUERRILLA GIRLS: GRÁFICA, 1985–2017'',
São Paulo Museum of Art The São Paulo Museum of Art (, or ') is an art museum in São Paulo, Brazil. It is well known for the architectural significance of its headquarters, a 1968 concrete and glass structure designed by Lina Bo Bardi. It is considered a landmark of ...
, São Paulo, Brazil


See also

* Feminist art criticism *
Feminist art movement in the United States The feminist art movement in the United States began in the early 1970s and sought to promote the study, creation, understanding and promotion of women's art. First-generation feminist artists include Judy Chicago, Miriam Schapiro, Suzanne Lac ...
* Guerrilla Girls On Tour


References


Further reading

*Boucher, Melanie. ''Guerrilla Girls: Disturbing the Peace''. Montreal: Galerie de l'UQAM, 2010. *Brand, Peg. "Feminist Art Epistemologies: Understanding Feminist Art". ''Hypatia''. 3 (2007): 166–89. *Guerilla Girls. ''Guerilla Girls: the art of behaving badly''. San Francisco, California: Chronicle Books, 2020. *Guerrilla Girls. ''Confessions of the Guerrilla Girls, with an Essay by Whitney Chadwick''. New York City: HarperCollins, 1995. *Guerrilla Girls. ''Bitches, Bimbos, and Ballbreakers: The Guerrilla Girls' Illustrated Guide to Female Stereotypes''. London: Penguin, 2003. *Guerrilla Girls. ''The Guerrilla Girls' Bedside Companion to the History of Western Art''. London: Penguin, 1998. *Janson, HW. ''Apes and Ape-Lore in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance''. London: Warburg Institute, University of London, 1952. *Page-Lieberman, Neysa (ed.). ''Not Ready to Make Nice: Guerrilla Girls in the Art World and Beyond'', with essays by Joanna Gardner-Huggett, Neysa Page-Lieberman, Kymberly Pinder, and a foreword by Jane M. Saks, Columbia College Chicago, 2011, 2013, 2017. *Raidiza, Kristen. "An Interview with the Guerrilla Girls, Dyke Action Machine DAM!, and the Toxic Titties". '' NWSA Journal''. 1 (2007): 39–48. . Accessed February 27, 2013. *Schechter, Joel. ''Satiric Impersonations: From Aristophanes to the Guerrilla Girls''. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1994.


External links

*
An interview
with Guerrilla Girls using the names Frida Kahlo and Kathe Kollwitz conducted January 19 and March 9, 2008, by Judith Olch Richards, for the
Archives of American Art The Archives of American Art is the largest collection of primary resources documenting the history of the visual arts in the United States. More than 20 million items of original material are housed in the Archives' research centers in Washing ...
* Guerilla Girls records,
Getty Research Institute The Getty Research Institute (GRI), located at the Getty Center in Los Angeles, California, is "dedicated to furthering knowledge and advancing understanding of the visual arts".
, Los Angeles. Accession No. 2008.M.14
Guerrilla Girls
Brooklyn Museum The Brooklyn Museum is an art museum in the New York City borough (New York City), borough of Brooklyn. At , the museum is New York City's second largest and contains an art collection with around 500,000 objects. Located near the Prospect Heig ...
's Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art
Guerrilla Girls: "You have to question what you see"
, video interview by
Tate Tate is an institution that houses, in a network of four art galleries, the United Kingdom's national collection of British art, and international modern and contemporary art. It is not a government institution, but its main sponsor is the UK ...

''The Feminist Future: Guerrilla Girls''
a video from a talk presented at the
Museum of Modern Art The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on 53rd Street (Manhattan), 53rd Street between Fifth Avenue, Fifth and Sixth Avenues. MoMA's collection spans the late 19th century to the present, a ...
{{Authority control American contemporary artists Feminist artists Feminist theory Political art Organizations based in New York City Culture of New York City Culture jamming Collective pseudonyms 20th-century American women artists Political masks Anonymous artists Year of birth unknown International artist groups and collectives American artist groups and collectives 1985 establishments in New York City Women in New York City