Feature image: Guerrilla Girls via artists' website
Guerilla Girls and the Fight for Equality
The Guerilla Girls are brash, unapologetic, disruptive, and don’t care what you think about it. This anonymous art collective is bringing the “F word” into art: Feminism. Born amidst the rise of second-wave feminism in the 1980s, the Guerilla Girls use art in radical ways to advocate for equity for women everywhere. Guerilla Girls' name stems from the term “guerilla warfare,” which involves an ambush-style attack to quickly disrupt the more heavily armed opponent. Guerilla is more than a name for this collective; it is how they bring their message to the world.
From gallery takeovers, to large scale flier hand-outs and postings, the mission of the Guerilla Girls is to demand change and draw attention to pressing issues of women’s representations in the art world. Donning gorilla masks and adopting pseudonyms based on famous women artists like Frida Kahlo, the Guerilla Girls make themselves difficult to ignore. And that’s exactly the point.
It’s easier to ignore an issue when you don’t know the problem exists. What the Guerilla Girls do is make these issues around gender discrimination in the art world so front and center that to turn away would be to outright admit you don’t care. Their mission began in 1985, at a time when feminism was once again entering mainstream culture and conversation. Women were advocating to be humanized, to be seen as more than the motherly roles they had been assigned following the World War II baby boom.
Their main weapon of choice was their words, utilizing a distinctive font similar to that of Barbara Kruger. The Guerilla Girls took to the streets, surrounding famous museums such as the Met in New York, to pass out fliers highlighting the rampant misogyny, overt sexualization of the female body, and lack of diversity in major art institutions.
By directly calling out these complicit institutions, artists, and art critics by name, the Guerilla Girls began to gain notoriety within the art world. Such a spectacle was unprecedented. In 1989, they debuted one of their most famous pieces.
Viewers beheld a bright yellow banner featuring a painted female nude, parodying the female nude figure from French artist Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres's painting Grande Odalisque, with her face replaced with a gorilla mask and the words “Do women have to be naked to get into the Met? Less than 5% of the artists in the Modern Art sections are women, but 85% of the nudes are female.” This illustrated one of their tactics—humorously called “weenie count”—in which they call attention to the percentage of female artists versus the percentage of female nudes in a gallery or museum.
In the 1990s, the group adopted the motto “fighting discrimination with facts, humor, and fake fur" and began to up the ante. Occupying space on billboards, buses, and more, the Guerilla Girls cemented their place as a force to be reckoned with in the art world—a force impossible to ignore.
The group still exists today, working in different factions to cover as much ground as possible. From the conservation of Guerilla Girls' history to a traveling theater group that features feminist performance art, the Guerilla Girls have no plans to stop anytime soon. In comparison to the average American’s feminist consciousness in the 1980s, the case can be made that they were years ahead of their time.
Intersectionality is a concept first articulated in 1989 by critical race theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw. Intersectionality refers to the idea that feminism must be consciously inclusive of the experiences of all women, races, socioeconomic classes, and backgrounds. This movement formed as a reproach to previous feminist movements, overwhelmingly composed of white women who simply wished to occupy the exact positions of power as their white male counterparts. It rests on the idea that if feminism isn’t for all women, then it really isn’t feminism. An intersectional feminist position uplifts all women by centering the needs of those marginalized by patriarchal systems.
The Guerilla Girls embodied this ideology through their actions and advocacy, with many of their flyers and campaigns denouncing the lack of diversity in museums and the almost non-existent representation of women of color in these high-art spaces. They called out the institutional racism that plagues so many museums to this day. Museums often display the art and culture of others, but the problem arises when these relics of culture are sourced in a way that does not respect the original group's intention or creation.
One pronounced example of this is the British Museum, which has come under fire numerous times for its poached hoard of cultural relics, many obtained through acts of colonialism and exploitation. Several religious groups, advocacy organizations, and countries have called for the British Museum to return these artifacts to their rightful stewards but have been met with little success. The work of the Guerilla Girls and similar organizations is beginning to dent the facade of the boys’ club of the art world by demanding attention be given to the most glaring damages of colonization and misogyny in these spaces.
Reclaiming space in one of the world’s wealthiest institutions is no easy feat for anyone. Where the Guerilla Girls may lack power in terms of money, actual decision-making, or leadership positions, they make up for in their sheer will and determination. And at the end of the day, if they can inspire you to look at the walls of museums a bit more critically, their mission is a success.
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