Guerrilla Girls is an anonymous group of feminist, female artists devoted to fighting sexism and racism within the art world. The group formed in New York City, United States in 1985, born out of a picket against the Museum of Modern Art the previous year. The core of the group's work is bringing gender and racial inequality into focus within the greater arts community and society at large.

The Guerrilla Girls employ culture jamming in the form of posters, books, billboards, lectures, interviews, public appearances and internet interventions to expose disparities, discrimination, and corruption (the latter includes conflicts of interest within museums). They also often use humor in their work to make their serious messages engaging. The Guerrilla Girls are known for their "guerrilla" tactics, hence their name, such as hanging up posters or staging surprise exhibitions.

History

During the height of the contemporary art movement in the late 20th century, many distinguished galleries lacked appropriate representation of female artists and curators. Museums were often privately funded by elites, predominately white males, meaning that museums were documenting power structures rather than art. Historically, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, like other major museums, had an entirely male or a predominantly male board of directors. It had a paucity of female artists on display, while, at the same time, art featuring female nudes were plentiful. The Guerrilla Girls were formed in 1985 with the purpose of exposing gender disparities in the contemporary art world. Initially, it did not plan to be a permanent organization. Its first press release, dated May 6, addressed its "campaign throughout the next weeks and next season." According to Frida Kahlo, there have been a total of 65 members. Inaugurating MoMA's newly renovated and expanded building, 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 (one account puts the number at eight), and none of them were women.

thumb|upright=1.6|Guerrilla Girls at the [[Victoria and Albert Museum, London|left]]

Comments attributed to the show's curator, Kynaston McShine highlight that era's explicit art world gender bias: "Kynaston McShine gave interviews saying that any artist who wasn't in the show should rethink career." However, it has been suggested that these putative quotes stem from comments in an interview McShine gave to the New York Times before the exhibition opened: “I think that some people can benefit from not being in the show.” He continued: “They will have to think about their work.”

When asked about the masks, the girls answer "We were Guerrillas before we were Gorillas. From the beginning, the press wanted publicity photos. We needed a disguise. No one remembers, for sure, how we got our fur, but one story is that at an early meeting, an original girl, a bad speller, wrote 'Gorilla' instead of 'Guerrilla'. It was an enlightened mistake. It gave us our 'mask-ulinity'." In an interview with the magazine Interview the Guerrilla Girls were quoted, "Anonymous free speech is protected by the Constitution. You'd be surprised what comes out of your mouth when you wear a mask."

A year after its founding, the group expanded its focus to include racism in the art world, attracting artists of color. The group is credited, above all, with sparking dialogue, and bringing national and international attention to issues of sexism and racism within the arts.

Influences

Many feminist artists in the 1970s dared to imagine that female artists could produce authentically and radically different art, undoing the prevailing visual paradigm. The pioneering feminist critic, Lucy Lippard curated an all-women exhibition in 1974, effectively protesting what most deemed a deeply flawed approach, that of merely assimilating women into the prevailing art system. Shaped by the 1970s women's movement, the Guerrilla Girls resolved to devise new strategies. Most noticeably, they realized that 1970s-era tools such as pickets and marches proved ineffective, as evidenced by how easily MoMA could ignore 200 protestors from the Women's Caucus for Art. "We had to have a new image and a new kind of language to appeal to a younger generation of women", recalls one of the founding Guerrilla Girls, who goes by "Liubov Popova." The Guerrilla Girls sought an alternative approach, one that would defeat views of the 1970s Feminist movements as man-hating, anti-maternal, strident, and humorless:

The Guerrilla Girls' projects (mostly posters at first) express observations, concerns, and ideals regarding numerous social topics. Their art has always been fact-driven, and informed by the group's unique approach to data collection, such as "weenie counts." To be more inclusive and to make their posters more eye-catching, the Guerrilla Girls tend to pair facts with humorous images – a form of word art. Although the Guerrilla Girls gained fame for wheat-pasting provocative campaign posters around New York City, the group has also enjoyed public commissions and indoor exhibitions.

In addition to posting posters around downtown Manhattan, they passed out thousands of small handbills based on their designs at various events. 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?" This print is unusual in the portfolio in that it takes the form of an enlarged handwritten letter on baby pink paper. The extremely rounded cursive script crowned with a frowning flower exudes femininity, symbolizing the biting sarcasm for which the Guerrilla Girls were known. The Guerrilla Girls sent this poster to well-known art collectors across the United States, pointing out how few works they owned by women artists. This send-up of femininity is aimed at the expectation that, even when presenting a serious complaint, women should do so in a socially acceptable 'nice' way. "We know that you feel terrible about this" appeals to the feelings of the recipient. This piece was a commentary on how hard it is for female artists, and what lengths they must go through in order to be recognized and taken seriously. Women are constantly expected to perform a certain way and this print is the embodiment of how tumultuous it is for women all around the world to be recognized in the eyes of men with power. The group later transcribed it into other languages and sent it to collectors outside the U.S. A practical joke with serious implications, this poster is now (somewhat ironically) a collector's item.

<blockquote>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.</blockquote>

thumb|[[Grande Odalisque (1814) by Ingres]]

The Guerrilla Girls' 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 number 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 Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres's painting Grande Odalisque (1814, Louvre Museum). The Guerrilla Girls placed a gorilla mask over the head of Ingres' nude, which is one of the most famous female nudes in Western art. The New York Public Art Fund had rejected the Guerrilla Girls' Metropolitan Museum poster for a billboard they had commissioned from the group. Rather than change the image, the group bought advertising space from the MTA, and the poster traversed lower Manhattan on New York City buses, until the MTA declined to renew their contract (evidently because they thought the fan handle looked phallic). and Mary Beard writes in her 2018 book, Civilisations: How Do We Look, that it took centuries in Greek antiquity until Praxiteles created the first female nude, Aphrodite of Knidos.

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. Stickers also became a popular calling cards representative of the group.

The Guerrilla Girls infiltrated the bathrooms of the newly opened Guggenheim Museum SoHo, placing stickers regarding female inequality on the walls.

In addition to researching and exposing sexism in the art world, the Guerrilla Girls have received commissions from numerous organizations and institutions, such as The Nation (2001), Fundación Bilbao Arte (2002), Istanbul Modern (2006) and Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art (2007). They have also partnered with Amnesty International, contributing pieces to a show under the organization's "Protect the Human" initiative.

They were interviewed for the film !Women Art Revolution.

In 1987, the Guerrilla Girls published thirty posters in a portfolio entitled Guerrilla Girls Talk Back. One specifically, We Sell White Bread, was a poster made to gradually widen their focus, tackling issues of racial discrimination in the art world and also making more direct, politicized interventions. Its medium, screen print on paper, has the words "We Sell White Bread" and are stamped on a slice of white bread alongside a list of ingredients that includes the white male artists whose work is on display at the galleries.

Since 2005, the Guerrilla Girls have been invited to produce special projects for international institutions, sometimes for the very institutions, they have criticized. Offers that pose a dilemma are carefully considered, so as to avoid censure since one way to improve institutions is to criticize them from inside.

In their 2006 poster The Future for Turkish Women Artists as Revealed by the Guerrilla Girls, commissioned by İstanbul Modern, they claimed that the status of women artists in Turkey was better than in the rest of Europe. In 2007, The Washington Post published their "Horror on the National Mall!", a one-page newspaper spread attacking the absence of diversity among tax-payer supported museums on the Mall in Washington, DC. During the 2007 ART-ATHINA, the Guerrilla Girls projected "Dear Art Collector" in Greek onto the entrance's façade. In 2015, they projected their "Dear Art Collector" animation onto a museum façade, taking on collectors who fail to pay employees a living wage. To commemorate the 20th Anniversary of the École Polytechnique massacre, the University of Quebec commissioned their Troubler Le Repos (Disturbing The Peace) poster, whose texts addressed anti-women hate speech since Ancient Greece to Rush Limbaugh.

In 2009, they launched I'm not a feminist, but If I were this is what I'd complain about ... , an interactive graffiti wall that enables women who don't see themselves as feminists the means to target gender issues with the hope that active participation will broaden their perspectives. In 2012, this traveled to Krakòw's Art Boom Festival.

In 2011, Columbia College Chicago's Glass Curtain Gallery and Institute for Women and Gender in the Arts and Media commissioned the first Guerrilla Girls survey of Chicago museums. The resulting banner entitled Chicago Museums [Guerrilla Girls to Museums: Time for Gender Reassignment!] critiqued gender disparity in the contemporary art collections of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Contemporary Art.

In 2012, an advertising truck towed Do women Have To Be Naked To Get into Boston Museums? around Boston. Invited by Yoko Ono to participate in the 2013 Meltdown Festival, the Guerrilla Girls updated their 2003 Estrogen Bomb poster, which had premiered in The Village Voice in 2003.

During Winter 2016, they participated in "Twin City Takeover", art exhibitions and art projects organized by a consortium of local art organizations sited around Minneapolis and St. Paul.

In 1996 Guerrilla Girls came out with Planet Pussy in Monkey Business issue #4 in November 1996. This was a work about feminism and was published by Sike Burmeister and Sabine Schmidt.

Film world

thumb|right|Guerrilla Girls billboard in Los Angeles protesting white male dominance at the [[Academy Awards|Oscars in 2002]]

To protest the lack of female directors, the Guerrilla Girls distributed stickers during the 2001 Sundance Film Festival. The Nation invited them to present Birth of Feminism, "Unchain the Women Directors".

During the 2015 Reykjavík Arts Festival, the Guerrilla Girls displayed National Film Quiz, a billboard criticizing the fact that 87% of national funding for films goes to men, despite women playing an important part of Iceland's public and private sectors. In light of 2016's #Oscarssowhite campaign, the Guerrilla Girls updated the above billboards, presenting them on downtown Minneapolis streets for "Twin City Takeover".

In 2023, the Guerrilla Girls were featured in the episode "Bodies of Knowledge of the American streaming series Art in the Twenty-First Century, season 11., in which they presented a new body of work.

Politics and social issues

Although the Guerrilla Girls' protest art directed at the art world remains their most well-known work, throughout their existence the group has periodically targeted politicians, specifically conservative Republicans. Those criticized have included George Bush, Newt Gingrich, and most recently Michele Bachmann. In 1991, the Artist and Homeless Collaborative invited them to work with homeless women to create posters in response to homelessness and the first Gulf War. Between 1992 and 1994, Guerrilla Girl posters addressed the 1992 presidential election, reproductive rights (done for the march on Washington in 1992), gay and lesbian rights, and the 1992 Los Angeles riots. During the 2012 election, they displayed their Even Michele Bachman believes. ... on a billboard adjacent to a football stadium to advertise her plan to: ban same-sex marriages, require voter ID checks, and spend money implementing statewide voter IDs. Their 2013 posters discussed the Homeland Terror Alert system and Arnold Schwarzenegger's gubernatorial campaign.

In 2016, the Guerrilla Girls launched the "President Trump Announces New Commemorative Months" campaign in the form of stickers and posters, which they distributed during the Women's March on Washington in Los Angeles and New York City, as well as the J20 event at the Whitney Museum of Art and the Fire Fink protest at MoMA.

Work: publications and merchandise

To shed light on inequality in the art world, the Guerrilla Girls have published numerous books. In 1995, they published their first book, Confessions of the Guerrilla Girls, a compilation of 50 works plus a self-interview. In 1998, they published The Guerrilla Girls Bedside Companion to the History of Western Art, a consciousness-raising comic book that sold 82,000 copies, as it explores how art history's male domination constrained several female artists' careers. In 2003, they published Bitches, Bimbos and Ballbreakers, a down and dirty catalogue of "The Top Stereotypes from Cradle to Grave". Offering thumbnail histories for cultural clichés ranging from "Daddy's Girl", "the Girl Next Door", "the Bimbo/Dumb Blonde" to "the Bitch/Ballbreaker", each is given "trademark Guerrilla Girl treatment: pointed factoids and cool graphics".

Their 2004 book The Guerrilla Girl's Museum Activity Book (reissued in 2012) parodies children's museum activity books. Meant to teach children how to both appreciate and critique museums, this book provides activities that reveal the problematic aspects of museum culture and major museum collections. In 2009, they produced a history of hysteria, The Hysterical Herstory Of Hysteria And How It Was Cured From Ancient Times Until Now. MFC-Michèle Didier published it in 2016.

Presentations

An important part of Guerrilla Girls' outreach since 1985 has been presentations and workshops at colleges, universities, art organizations, and sometimes at museums. The presentations, known as "gigs", attract hundreds and sometimes thousands of attendees. In the gig, they play music, videos, show slides and talk about the history of their work, how it has evolved. In the end, the GGs interact with audience members. New work is always included and gig material changes all the time. They have done hundreds of these events and have traveled to nearly every state as well as Europe, South America, and Australia.

thumb|right|Organizers with the Guerrilla Girls, Art+Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-thon, Minneapolis

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

To mark the 30th anniversary of the Guerrilla Girls, Matadero Madrid hosted "Guerrilla Girls: 1985–2015", an exhibition featuring most of the collective's production accompanied by a series of events including a talk/performance by Guerrilla Girl members Frida Kahlo and Käthe Kollwitz. The exhibition also showed the 1992 documentary "Guerrilla in Our Midst" by Amy Harrison.

Three Guerrilla Girls appeared on the Stephen Colbert show on January 14, 2016.

Exhibitions

Early solo exhibitions included: "The Night the Palladium Apologized" (1985), Palladium (New York City); "Guerrilla Girls Review the Whitney" (1987), Clocktower PS1; and "Guerrilla Girls" (1995), Printed Matter, Inc.

Career surveys include:

  • "Guerrilla Girls Talk Back: The First Five Years, A Retrospective: 1985–1990" (1991), the Falkirk Cultural Center, San Rafael, California
  • "The Guerrilla Girls" (2002), Fundacíon Bilbao Arte, Bilbao, ES
  • "Guerrilla Girls" (2007), Hellenic American Union Galleries, Athens, GR
  • "Guerrilla Girls: Retrospective" (2009), Millennium Court Arts Centre, UK *"Feminist Masked Avengers: 30 Early Guerrilla Girls' Posters" (2011) Mason Gross School of the Arts Galleries
  • "The Guerrilla Girls Talk Back" (2011), National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC
  • "Not Ready to Make Nice: The Guerrilla Girls in the Art World and Beyond" Columbia College Chicago (2012–2017) Traveled to Monserrat College of Art; Krannert Art Museum; Fairfield University; Georgia Museum of Art; DePauw University; North Michigan University: Stony Brook University: California State University: The Verge Center for the Arts: and Moore College for Art and Design.
  • "Guerrilla Girls: 1985–2013", Azkuna Zentroa (2013).
  • "Guerrilla Girls: Takeover" (2021), Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, Texas.
  • "Guerrilla Girls: Making Trouble" (2025) Guerrilla Girls mark their fortieth anniversary in 2025 exhibition at the National Museum of Women in the Arts
  • "How to be a Guerrilla Girl", Getty Center, Los Angeles, California (2025–2026)

On the heels of "Not Ready to Make Nice" were:

  • "The Male Graze: Guerrilla Girls", 2021, Museum of London
  • "Art at the Center: Guerrilla Girls", 2016, Walker Art Center
  • "Front Room: Guerrilla Girls", 2016–2017, Baltimore Museum of Art
  • "Guerrilla Girls: Not Ready to Make Nice, 30 Years and Still Counting", 2015, Abrons Arts Center;
  • "Not Ready to Make Nice: Guerrilla Girls 1985–2016", 2016–2017, FRAC Lorraine.
  • "The Guerrilla Girls and La Barbe", 2016, Gallery mfc-micheledidier, Paris.
  • "Guerrilla Girls" The Verge Center for the Arts, Sacramento, California (2017)

Controversies

Diversity

Despite having routinely challenged art institutions to display more artists of color, both members and critics want the Guerrilla Girls to be more diverse. Their art was believed to be exclusive to white feminism and they addressed by creating a series of activist artworks addressing a range of issues that women faced. "Zora Neale Hurston" recalls Guerrilla Girl membership as "mostly white" and largely mirroring the art world demographics that they critiqued. They have "staunchly, and problematically, resisted being surveyed as to the makeup of their own membership". The artist believed in the overt artistic expression by correlating beauty and pain, along with the rise of modernism.

Several Guerrilla Girls who are people of color have faced numerous challenges. Despite the Guerrilla Girls' stance against tokenism, some artists of color abandoned Guerrilla Girl membership due to tokenism, silencing, disrespect, and whitewashing. "Thomas" recalls little effort being devoted to understanding the challenges of artists of color. "Their whiteness was such that they ... didn't understand that blacks were being put in a completely separate world in the art world, that black male artists and black female artists are completely separated, completely segregated to this day."

Second-wave feminism and essentialism

thumb|Anonymous MCAD student protest against the Guerrilla GirlsEmerging at the tail end of the second-wave feminist movement, the Guerrilla Girls navigated the differences between established and emerging feminist theory during the 1980s. "Alma Thomas" describes this grey-area that the Guerrilla Girls occupied as "universalist feminism", bordering on essentialism. Aside from essentialism, the Guerrilla Girls have also been critiqued for failing to integrate intersectionality into their work. primarily represented the views of "Kahlo" and "Kollwitz". Some even felt that "Kahlo" and "Kollwitz" completely controlled the book, despite their having selected material created collectively by all Guerrilla Girls. There was even suspicion that these two not only claimed all the credit but took all of the profits. Some members condemned the book as "undemocratic and ... against the spirit of the [Guerrilla] Girls".

This prompted negative reactions from both current and former Guerrilla Girls, who objected to "Kahlo" and "Kollwitz" claiming responsibility for having created the collective effort, as well as the flippancy with which they exchanged their anonymity for legal standing.

thumb|Guerrilla Girls display at [[Mills College; Public Works: Artists' Interventions 1970s–Now]]

Museum Exhibitions

Upon their 1985 debut, the Guerrilla Girls were "lauded by the very establishment they sought to undermine". They have since exhibited at Tate Modern, Venice Biennale, Centre Pompidou, and MoMA, which additionally grants them a broader audience for their concerns. Since then, this relationship has only intensified, as the Guerrilla Girls presented their exhibitions in museums and even allowed their works to be collected by hegemonic institutions. Although some have questioned the efficacy, if not hypocrisy, of the group's working within the system that they originally denigrated, few would challenge their decision to let the Getty Research Institute house their archives.

Members and names

thumb|left|Two members of the Guerrilla Girls join a panel discussion at the Rochester Art Center in 2016 in Rochester, Minnesota

Membership in the New York City group is exclusive, 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; Guerrilla 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. For some members like "Zora Neale Hurston", or Emma Amos, identities have only been made public posthumously.

In August 2025, the Italian art magazine Artribune reported that, in an interview with a member using the pseudonym "Alice Neel", the member identified herself as painter Robin Tewes.

Gorilla symbolism

thumb|upright|The 1933 film [[King Kong (1933 film)|King Kong was influential to the concept of a Guerrilla Girl.]]

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".</blockquote>

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.

<blockquote>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.</blockquote>

Though this goal has never been explicitly stated by the group, 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 first popularized by Renaissance thinker Giovanni Boccaccio who alleged that "the artist in imitating nature only follows Nature's own command".

Legacy

thumb|Ridykeulous, The Advantages of Being a <del>Woman</del> <ins>Lesbian</ins> Artist, 2007

The group Ridykeulous overwrote the 1988 Gorilla Girls' poster The Advantages of Being a Woman Artist with their own messages in 2007.

Notable collections

  • Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois
  • Center for the Study of Political Graphics, Culver City, California
  • Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University, New York City
  • Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Madison, WI
  • Museum of Modern Art, New York City
  • Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota
  • Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City

See also

  • Feminist art criticism
  • Feminist art movement in the United States
  • Guerrilla Girls On Tour

References

Further reading

  • Boucher, Melanie. Guerrilla Girls: Disturbing the Peace. Montreal: Galerie de l'UQAM, 2010.
  • Brand, Peg. "Feminist Art Epistemologies: Understanding Feminist Art". Hypatia. 3 (2007): 166–89.
  • Guerrilla Girls. Guerrilla Girls: the art of behaving badly. San Francisco, California: Chronicle Books, 2020.
  • Guerrilla Girls. Confessions of the Guerrilla Girls, with an Essay by Whitney Chadwick. New York City: HarperCollins, 1995.
  • Guerrilla Girls. Bitches, Bimbos, and Ballbreakers: The Guerrilla Girls' Illustrated Guide to Female Stereotypes. London: Penguin, 2003.
  • Guerrilla Girls. The Guerrilla Girls' Bedside Companion to the History of Western Art. London: Penguin, 1998.
  • Janson, HW. Apes and Ape-Lore in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. London: Warburg Institute, University of London, 1952.
  • Page-Lieberman, Neysa (ed.). Not Ready to Make Nice: Guerrilla Girls in the Art World and Beyond, with essays by Joanna Gardner-Huggett, Neysa Page-Lieberman, Kymberly Pinder, and a foreword by Jane M. Saks, Columbia College Chicago, 2011, 2013, 2017.
  • Raidiza, Kristen. "An Interview with the Guerrilla Girls, Dyke Action Machine DAM!, and the Toxic Titties". NWSA Journal. 1 (2007): 39–48. . Accessed February 27, 2013.
  • Schechter, Joel. Satiric Impersonations: From Aristophanes to the Guerrilla Girls. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1994.
  • An interview with Guerrilla Girls using the names Frida Kahlo and Kathe Kollwitz conducted January 19 and March 9, 2008, by Judith Olch Richards, for the Archives of American Art
  • Guerrilla Girls records, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. Accession No. 2008.M.14
  • Guerrilla Girls, Brooklyn Museum's Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art
  • Guerrilla Girls: "You have to question what you see" , video interview by Tate
  • The Feminist Future: Guerrilla Girls a video from a talk presented at the Museum of Modern Art
  • Guerrilla Girls, Do Women Need to Be Naked a video produced by Smarthistory and the Getty Research Institute, J. Paul Getty Trust