Guerrilla Girls

Guerrilla Girls

Formation	1985
Headquarters	New York, New York, United States
Region served	Worldwide
Official language	English
Website	www.guerrillagirls.com

Guerrilla Girls are an anonymous group of female artists and feminists devoted to fighting sexism and racism within the art world internationally. The group formed in New York City in 1985 with the mission of bringing gender and racial inequality within the fine arts to light. Members are known for the gorilla masks they wear to remain anonymous.

History

Guerrilla Girls wear gorilla masks whenever making public appearances.

Guerrilla Girls formed in the spring of 1985 in response to the Museum of Modern Art's exhibition "An International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture", which opened in 1984. The exhibition was the inaugural show in the MoMA's newly renovated and expanded building, and was planned to be a survey of the most important contemporary artists.

In total, the show featured works by 169 artists, of whom only 13 were female. A comment by the show's curator, Kynaston McShine, further highlighted the gendered bias of the exhibition and of MoMA as an institution: “Kynaston McShine, gave interviews saying that any artist who wasn’t in the show should rethink ‘his’ career.” In reaction to the exhibition, and to McShine's comment, founding Guerrilla Girls "Kathe Kollwitz" and "Frida Kahlo" began to stage protests outside of the museum.

The protests yielded little success, however, and so Kollwitz and Kahlo decided to found the Guerilla Girls group and come up with a new protest strategy. Their first major action was to embark upon a postering campaign throughout New York City, particularly in the SoHo and East Village neighborhoods.

Once better established, the group also started taking note of racism within the art world, incorporating artists of color into their fold. They also began working on projects outside of New York, commenting on sexism and racism nationally and internationally. Though the art world has remained the group's main focus, challenging sexism and racism in films, mass and popular culture, and politics has also been part of the Guerrilla Girl's agenda. Tokenism also represents a major group concern.

Current status

Since 1985 the Guerrilla Girls have witnessed some positive changes within the art world, including an increased awareness of sexism, and more 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.

In 1999 the Guerilla Girls incorporated and in the following years two other incorporated groups branched off: an online presence, GuerrillaGirlsBroadBand, and a touring theater group, Guerrilla Girls On Tour!. In 2003, Guerrilla Girls filed a lawsuit against these two groups for copyright and trademark infringement.

Activity

Guerrilla Girls organize protests, create posters, stickers, billboards and artwork, present at public speaking engagements and research into the unfair conditions of working women artists and artists of color.

Early organizing was based around meetings where the group would evaluate the statistical data they 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.

Notably, during the first years after its founding, the Guerrilla Girl's started conducting "weenie counts," where members would go to institutions, like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and count the male to female subject ratio in artworks. The data gathered from the Met's public collections in 1989 showed that in the Modern Art sections less than 5% of the works were by female artists, while 85% of the nudes were female.

The Guerrilla Girls have since done research into sexism and created artworks at the request of various people and institutions, among others, the Istanbul Modern, Istanbul, Witte de With Center for Contemporary Arts, Rotterdam and Fundación Bilbao Arte Fundazioa, Bilbao. They have also partnered with Amnesty International, contributing pieces to a show under the organization's "Protect the Human" initiative.

In recognition of their work, the Guerrilla Girls have been invited to give talks at world-renown 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 Arts Institute Chicago.

Protest art

Guerrilla Girls billboard in Los Angeles protesting white male dominance at the Oscars in 2009.

Throughout their existence the Guerrilla Girls have gained the most attention for their bold protest art.

Their works, mainly posters, are used to express their ideals, opinions and concerns with regard to a variety of topics. The Guerrilla Girl's art has always been fact-driven, and informed by the group's data collection and so-called "weenie counts". However, to be more inclusive and to make their posters more eye-catching, the Guerrilla Girls pair facts with humorous images: "We use facts, humor and outrageous visuals to expose sexism, racism and corruption in politics, art, film and pop culture." 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?"

In the early days, posters were brainstormed, designed and then hung around New York City. Small handbills based on their designs were also passed out at events by the thousands. The first posters were mainly black and white fact-sheets, highlighting inequalities between male and female artists with regard to number of exhibitions, gallery representation and pay. The posters also intended to reveal how sexist the art world was in comparison to other industries and to national averages. For example, in the 1985 they printed a poster showing that the salary gap between men and women in the art world 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 also 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, and 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 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 Girl's 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 amount 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 the Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres painting La Grande Odalisque, one of the most famous female nudes in Western art history, with a guerrilla head placed over the original face.

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. For one day, New York's MTA Bus Company also displayed bus advertisements with Met. Museum poster.

Stickers also became popular calling cards representative of the group. In the mid-1980s they infiltrated, without masks to maintain anonymity, the Guggenheim Museum bathrooms, placing stickers they had created about female inequality on the walls.

In 1998, Guerrilla Girls West protested at the San Jose Museum of Art, over low representation of women artists.

Since 2002, Guerrilla Girls have designed and installed billboards in Los Angeles during the Oscars to expose white male dominance in the film industry, such as: "Anatomically Correct Oscars", "Even the Senate is More Progressive than Hollywood", "The Birth of Feminism," "Unchain the Women Directors." In 2005 the group created large-format posters and an installation at the Venice Biennale. The 2005 Biennale was the first in 110 years to be overseen by women.

Though the Guerrilla Girls' protest art directed at the art world remains their most well-known work, throughout their existence the group has also periodically created pieces attacking politicians, specifically, conservative Republicans. Those criticized have included George Bush, Newt Gingrich and most recently Michelle Bachmann.

Ironically, many major museums criticized by the Guerrilla Girls, such as the MoMA and Tate Modern now own works by the group in their collection.

Publications

Guerrilla Girls have also published several books on the subject of inequality in the art world. In 1995 they published their first book: Confessions of the Guerrilla Girls. In 1998, they published The Guerilla Girls Bedside Companion to History of Western Art and followed with the 2003 book Bitches, Bimbos and Ballbreakers. The 2004 book The Guerrilla Girl’s Museum Activity Book (with an updated edition from 2012) is a parody of a children's museum activity book, with each the activities meant to reveal a problematic aspect of museum culture and major museum collections. A new book on the subject of hysteria is forthcoming.

Members & names

Membership in the New York City group is by invitation only, based on relationships with current and past members, and one's involvement in the contemporary art world. A mentoring 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; Guerilla 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 generally based on dead female artists. Members goes by names such as Kathe Kollwitz, Alma Thomas, Rosalba Carriera, Frida Kahlo, Julia de Borgos, and Hannah Höch. Guerrilla Girls' "Carriera" is credited with the idea of using pseudonyms as ways to not forget female artists. Having read about Rosalba Carriera in a footnote of Letters on Cezanne by Maria Rainer Rilke, 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.

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 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, 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 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 original image by Ingres without the addition of the gorilla head represents the kind of art that the Guerrilla Girls take issue with. The odalique, a harem woman, lies naked on a bed and looks seductively out from the canvas. Orientalist touches (fan, head wrap, fabrics and pipe) add a degree of exoticism to the image. In the feminist and post-colonial context an image like Ingres' is therefore highly problematic.

The gorilla is also typically associated with masculinity. 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, it is also helpful to note that 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 fist popularized by Renaissance thinker Giovanni Boccaccio who alleged that "the artist in imitating nature only follows Nature's own command." The Guerrilla Girl's critique of art institutions mainly centers on the fact that there are fewer female subjects and artists represented in major art collections, a fact which is not at all reflective of the world's overall population. Ignoring women artists or artists of color cannot be seen as ars simia naturae, a fact that the ape image, whether intentionally or not, calls attention to.

Notable collections

• Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois
• Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York
• Tate

Notable exhibitions

• The Night the Palladium Apologized, 1985, Palladium, New York, New York
• Guerrilla Girls Review the Whitney, 1987, The Clocktower, New York, New York
• Guerrilla Girls Printed Matter, 1995, 77 Wooster Street, SoHo

See also

• Feminist art movement
• Guerrilla Girls On Tour

References

Bibliography

• Boucher, Melanie. Guerrilla Girls: Disturbing the Peace. Montreal: Galerie de l'UQAM, 2010. ISBN 2-920325-32-9
• Brand, Peg. "Feminist Art Epistemologies: Understanding Feminist Art." Hypatia. 3 (2007): 166-89.
• Guerrilla Girls. Bitches, Bimbos, and Ballbreakers: The Guerrilla Girls' Illustrated Guide to Female Stereotypes. London: Penguin, 2003. ISBN 978-0-14-200101-1
• Guerrilla Girls. Confessions of the Guerrilla Girls. How a Bunch of Masked Avengers Fight Sexism and Racism in the Art World with Facts, Humor and Fake Fur. New York City: HarperCollins, 1995. ISBN 0-04-440947-8
• Guerrilla Girls. The Guerrilla Girls' Bedside Companion to the History of Western Art. London: Penguin, 1998. ISBN 978-0-14-025997-1
• Janson, HW. Apes and Ape-Lore in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. London: Warburg Institute, University of London, 1952.
• Raidiza, Kristen. "An Interview with the Guerrilla Girls, Dyke Action Machine DAM!, and the Toxic Titties." NWSA Journal. 1 (2007): 39-48. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/431723>. Accessed 27.2.2013.
• Schechter, Joel. Satiric Impersonations: From Aristophanes to the Guerrilla Girls. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1994. ISBN 978-0-8093-1868-1

External links

• Guerrilla Girls, official website
• The Feminist Future: Guerrilla Girls a video from a talk presented at the Museum of Modern Art.
• Guerrilla Girls, Brooklyn Museum's Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art