Who are the Guerrilla Girls?

With members all over the world, this anonymous group of feminists activists are devoted to fighting sexism and racism within the art world.

Most importantly, they are intersectional feminists. Some of you may not know the difference, but intersectional feminism is opposed to « white feminism », as it fights for all women (including women of color) and includes the notions of discrimination and privilege. For example, a white feminist may fight for her right to wear a mini-skirt but condemn muslim women for wanting to wear a hijab. Whereas in this situation an intersectional feminist would fight for the right for all women to dress as they like.

Therefore, the Guerrilla Girls try to acknowledge the privilege of white women in the struggle for representation of women artists in museums.

Basically, the Guerrilla Girls condemn the fact that on most museums, pieces of art represent women (often naked) whereas female artists are not featured in exhibitions. As you can see on one of the first posters they made in 1985, which says that back then, in the Modern Art section of the Met Museum (N-Y) 76% of the nudes were female even though less than 4% of the artists were women. So when you go visit a museum, you will most likely see sculptures, paintings, drawings, representing naked women but you will not see more than a couple of female artists being featured in the exhibitions. And the women artists you do see represented will most likely be white. The goal of Guerrilla Girls is to raise awareness about this issue, and to force museums to act for change.

Another key point in their ideology is that they wish to be anonymous. To do so, they wear gorilla masks in public representations, hence the pun guerrilla / gorilla. They do so because they want their message to be universal, they want people to focus on what they are saying instead of who they are. They believe that « issues matter more than individual identities ».

As we mentioned earlier, the group has existed for decades. They formed in 1985, after seven women launched the Guerrilla Girls in response to the Museum of Modern Art's exhibition "An International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture" (1984), whose list of 165 artists included only 13 women even though 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.

This was their first poster, made in the same year, which clearly shows their goal to make the art community focus on gender and racial inequality.

In 1989 the Guerrilla Girls also designed the You're Seeing Less than Half the Picture poster, to illustrate the fact that by excluding the work of women artists and artists of color you only show the same narratives and points of view over and over, instead of showing a diversity of points of view.

During its first years, the Guerrilla Girls conducted what they called "weenie counts", meaning that members visited institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art and counted artworks' male-to-female subject ratios, then the data was turned into posters as the one featured in this article.

Soon after they also took on projects outside of New York, which is why the group is credited for having created conversations and for bringing awareness nationally and internationally to issues of sexism and racism within the arts for more than 30 years.

You must be wondering what they actually did to raise awareness, well they mostly drew attention to their cause through their catchy and bold posters but also through their books, actions, videos, stickers, billboards, bus ads and campaigns. They also did interventions and exhibitions at museums to as they say and i quote « blast them on their own walls for their bad behavior and discriminatory practices ». They are very much driven by facts and the data that they collect, as to educate people. They have done projects all over the world, in New York, Mexico City, Bilbao, Rotterdam, and Shanghai, just to name a few.

To give more specific examples, they were invited in 2005 at the biennale of Venice , which was directed for the first time by two women: Rosa Martinez and Maria de Corral; as well as at the Istanbul Modern Museum in 2006. They made a poster especially for this exhibition by using the fact that In Istanbul, coffee grounds are used to tell people's fortunes to make a poster denouncing directly sexism towards Turkish women. To give you an idea, in 2020 they did 13 exhibitions and in 2019 they did 34.

In early 2020 they made a video to raise awareness about the Black Lives Matter movement featuring the following message « the acts of police violence in the U.S. are crimes against humanity. At an alarming rate, darker hued people are subjected to genocidal practices executed by institutions rooted in colonialism and racism. Black lives matter is the human rights movement of our time. » which shows that even though the art community is a specific interest to them, their goal is also to fight sexism and racism globally, as this poster violence against homeless women also shows.

And right now, and for the whole month of October, collaborating with the @changethemuseum collective, they are calling for a boycott of the museums in the U.S. because they state that « As museums across the United States begin to reopen in the midst of a global pandemic, they do so by depending on the labour of essential, frontline workers (...) the majority of whom identify as Black, Indigenous and People of Color, and who barely make livable wages (...) so that museum administrators ”largely white, and making six-figure salaries” can meet financial goals (...) even though many of these museums have done little to address staff complaints of racist behaviors ».