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The Guerrilla Girls are an anonymous group of radical feminist artists established in New York City in 1985, known for posters, books, billboards, appearances and other creative forms of culture jamming that expose discrimination and corruption. Trained as visual artists, their first work was putting up posters on the streets of New York decrying the gender and racial imbalance of artists represented in galleries and museums. Over the years they expanded their activism to examine Hollywood and the film industry, popular culture, gender stereotyping and corruption in the art world. They wear gorilla masks in public and took the names of dead women artists as pseudonyms. They have remained anonymous to this day.
The Guerrilla Girls invented a unique combination of content, text, and snappy graphics that present feminist viewpoints in a humorous manner. Their intention is that many viewers who initially disagree with their positions will get drawn in by the comic hook, think about the issues, and then change their minds. Guerrilla Girls claim to want to rehabilitate the “f” word (feminism) so that people who believe in the tenets of radical feminism (equal opportunity, an end to gender based discrimination, equal access to education, freedom from sexual exploitation and abuse, reproductive rights education and human rights for women everywhere) will also want to call themselves feminists.
In 2000, two groups split off to form Guerrilla Girls On Tour, a theatre troupe that does vaudevillian plays, and Guerrilla Girls Broadband that focuses on internet issues. Guerrilla Girls On Tour is a separate and independent group and is not the author of any of the work on the Guerrilla Girls website: www.guerrillagirls.com . Neither of the these groups share members with the Guerrilla Girls. Despite its name, Guerrilla Girls On Tour is not the “touring wing” of the Guerrilla Girls.
Every year Guerrilla Girls visit over 25 colleges and universities, in full jungle drag, giving presentations of their history and work. They also do on-site workshops and online seminars to encourage local activism. Exhibitions of Guerrilla Girls’ work have been organized at museums in the US, and at the Tate Modern, London, The Centre Pompidou Paris, and others.
Guerrilla Girls maintain a large, well-trafficked website where almost all their works and actions can be seen and where there is a lot of information about their history and tactics: www.guerrillagirls.com. They also sell posters, books, tee-shirts and other merchandise and they book appearances from this site. Many museums, libraries and schools own portfolios of Guerrilla Girl work.
The Guerrilla Girls began in 1985, after a few women attended an exhibition titled “An International Survey of Painting and Sculpture” held by the Museum of Modern Art in New York and discovered that only 13 of the 169 featured artists were women. The ratio of artists of color were even smaller, none of whom were women artists either.[1]
One of their most famous posters was plastered across New York City buses in 1989. Its headline read, "Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum?" The Guerrilla Girls conducted a "weenie count" at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, counting naked males and naked females in the artworks as well as numbers of female artists in the collection. Less than 5% of the artists in the Met's modern art sections were women, but 85% of the nudes were female. Their design[2] was rejected by The Public Art Fund as a billboard so the Guerrilla Girls ran it as an ad in the public buses in New York City. This poster has been exhibited all over the world and reproduced in many, many textbooks on all subjects from geography to art history to women's studies. The GGs went back in 2005 to do a recount and found that there are now fewer women artists shown at the Met, but more naked males in the artworks.
Members of the original group proclaim that no one knows their identities, except for some of their mothers and/or partners. They never reveal the number of members of the group, implying that there are many Guerrilla Girls, or at least Guerrilla Girl supporters, all over the world.
The Guerrilla Girls chose their name “guerrilla” because they “…wanted to play with the fear of guerrilla warfare, to make people afraid of who [they] might be and where [they] might strike next”.[1] They call themselves “girls” instead of “women” to reclaim the belittling usage of the word and to shock and to upset people, particularly other feminist groups. The idea of wearing gorilla masks came from a need to have a disguise, and the story is that in an early meeting, an original member misspelled “Guerrilla” as “Gorilla”.[1] Guerrilla Girls split into three new groups in 2001.
In addition to posters, Guerrilla Girls have authored five books: Confessions of the Guerrilla Girls (Harper Collins, 1995) The Guerrilla Girls Bedside Companion to the History of Western Art (Penguin, 1998) Bitches, Bimbos and Ballbreakers, the Guerrilla Girls Guide to Female Stereotypes, (Penguin, 2003), The Guerrilla Girls Art Museum Activity Book (Printed Matter, 2005) and The Hysterical Herstory of Hysteria and How It Was Cured From Ancient Times Until Now (2010). Their books have become popular textbooks in art and art history, women and gender studies, sociology and political science.
Their campaign against discrimination in Hollywood has taken the form of Billboards installed in Hollywood around the time of the Oscars with headlines like: "The Anatomically Correct Oscar: He’s white and male, just like the guys who win!" and "Even the US Senate is More Progressive Than Hollywood!," followed by stats of female directors compared to female senators. They’ve also plastered stickers in the bathrooms of the movie theatres around the world as well as at the Sundance Film Festival.
Over the past few years Guerrilla Girls have faced a dilemma: What do activists do when the establishment they’ve spent their whole life attacking suddenly embraces them? They claim to agonize over this but they have decided to accept as many invitations as possible to get their message out. They also revel in the irony of being invited to critique institutions on their very walls, as they did at the Venice Biennale, the Istanbul Museum of Modern Art and art centers in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.
In 2007 the Guerrilla Girls did a special spread for the Washington Post that exposed the embarrassingly low numbers of women and artist of color on exhibit at public, tax payer funded US museums on the National Mall in Washington. The project provoked the National Gallery to quickly reinstall a sculpture by Martin Puryear, so as to have at least one artwork on exhibit by an African American. The female curators at the National Gallery became politicized over the event and say they are working to make the museum's exhibitions and acquisitions more diverse.
In 2008 Guerrilla Girls opened Feminist Futures, the first ever symposium on feminist art at the Museum of Modern Art, by thanking MoMA for making them so mad in 1985 that they started the Guerrilla Girls. Then they went on to expose corruption in New York museums, including MoMA.
Their newest project is a graffiti wall containing centuries of hate speech against women and feminists that appeared on the streets of Montreal in December, 2009, to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Polytechnique Massacre.
It has been said that Guerrilla Girls' work on behalf of marginalized female artists and artists of color within the art world serves the needs of only a handful of privileged artists, but the GG cause and work have been taken up by women’s groups everywhere from Brazil to India, Mexico, Europe, Cyprus, Bosnia and Serbia.
Other critics assert that their activities ignore the larger trend of misogyny and patriarchy in society, focusing too narrowly on the self-interested pursuit of greater marketability and recognition of female artists.[citation needed] To this, the Guerrilla Girls point to the fact that more than a third of their posters and campaigns have addressed larger societal issues including violence against women, racial inequality, war, reproductive choice, and what they consider to be misguided political policies.[citation needed]
In a 1998 interview with Utne Reader, two Guerrilla Girls spoke about their influences. One member, using the name Frida Kahlo, spoke generally: "The women artists I admire most are those who had to struggle the hardest and found outrageous and inventive ways to have creative lives." Another, calling herself Käthe Kollwitz, said: "One of my favorites is Edmonia Lewis, a 19th-century sculptor, part Chippewa, part African American, who got herself to Rome, where there was a little less discrimination. She made huge marble sculptures of Civil War and anti-slavery heroes and mythological figures. She managed to survive by crating up huge sculptures and sending them to collectors in the United States along with invoices, even though they hadn't ordered them. Often enough, they would send money back."[3]
The Guerrilla Girls' slogans and artwork were used in the film Itty Bitty Titty Committee (2007).[4]
Confessions of the Guerrilla Girls (Harper Collins, 1995) The Guerrilla Girls Bedside Companion to the History of Western Art (Penguin, 1998) Bitches, Bimbos and Ballbreakers, the Guerrilla Girls Guide to Female Stereotypes, (Penguin, 2003), The Guerrilla Girls Art Museum Activity Book (Printed Matter, 2005) "The Hysterical Herstory of Hysteria and How It Was Cured from Ancient Times Until Now" (2010)
   | Guerrilla Girls Official Website - GUERRILLAGIRLS: Fighting discrimination with facts, humor and fake fur |
| | Guerrilla Girls on Tour - Guerrilla Girls on Tour! Changing the World, One Sexist City at a Time. |
| | L.A. Times article on GG Oscars campaign - shana ting lipton .com - "Dreaming of Mr. Right's Rookie Card" The Los Angeles Times |
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