Guerrilla Girls

An early Guerrilla Girls poster published as a political statement in reaction to the Gulf War.

• Guerilla Girls (collective).
• Offset printed poster.
• This work is presented unframed.

The Guerilla Girls are a group of anonymous artists and activists interested in promoting gender equality within the art world. Made famous by their poster Do Women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum? and their gorilla-mask disguises, the collective uses a combination of iconic imagery and statistics to disseminate their message. “We try to twist an issue around and present it in a way that hasn’t been seen before, using facts and humor, in the hope of changing people’s mind,” said a masked member of the group. “We take on issues we are passionate about, but we don’t always succeed. If we don’t come up with something we think is worth putting out there, we don’t.” The artists’ work is often displayed in public spaces, and has taken the form of billboards, pamphlets, and museum installations. The Guerilla Girls was founded in 1985 in reaction to The Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition “An International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture,” which included 13 female artists and 152 male artists. Soon after, members protested the lack of work by women in a number of major art institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Since their founding, the Guerilla Girls have been critiqued for a lack of racial diversity and promoting essentialist feminist, issues which the group has since attempted to resolve. The group’s work is currently held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Tate Gallery in London, and The Museum of Modern Art in New York, among others.