The Guerrilla Girls
The Guerrilla Girls are a collective who highlight discrimination and corruption in the art world, politics, and popular culture. The group comprises an undisclosed number of women artists who hide their identities by wearing gorilla masks and assuming pseudonyms taken from deceased women artists, such as the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo (1907–1954) and German printmaker Käthe Kollwitz (1867–1945). The anonymity of the group means that they can draw attention to issues rather than to personalities, reacting against the artworld obsession with artists.
The collective was first conceived in New York in 1984 upon learning that only 7.7% of the works included in the blockbuster exhibition International Survey of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) (1984) were by female artists. To draw awareness to this discrimination, they launched a poster campaign in 1985 targeting museums, dealers, curators, critics and artists who they felt were actively responsible for, or complicit in, the exclusion of women and artists of colour from mainstream exhibitions and publications.
Further Reading
Guerrilla Girls, The Guerrilla Girls’ bedside companion to the history of Western art. New York: Penguin Books, 1998.
Guerrilla Girls, Confessions of the Guerrilla Girls. London: Pandora, 1995.
Selected Collections
Tate
Victoria and Albert Museum
