Female Iconoclasts: Guerrilla Girls

Fighting sexism and racism within the art world

The first efforts of the collective focused on the sexist MoMA exhibition of 1985 with protests outside the museum. However, their activities did not gain much traction, so they pivoted strategy to engage in culture jamming, by wheat-pasting posters throughout downtown Manhattan – a tactic that would become synonymous with their efforts.

Adept at employing data and statistics to bolster their cases against the mainstream art world, their earliest work is in the form of black and white posters that use tongue-in-cheek humour to display facts about women’s place within the industry. In 1985, they illustrated the salary gap in the art world divided by gender, illustrating that women artists earn only ⅓ of male artists, and attacking the galleries that show just a fraction, or no women artists at all. 

Tackling prevailing criticisms of feminism, the group used humour to expand how could feminist art take shape could be with their 1986 work Dearest Art Collector taking the form of a girlish swirling cursive script on baby-pink paper imploring – with cloying politeness riddled with sarcasm – art collectors to acknowledge how few works they collected by women artists.

Additionally, in the early years, they conducted what they called “weenie counts”: surveys that included visits to notable institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art where members counted artworks’ male-to-female subject ratios. This data then featured in the groups arguably most famous work that asked sarcastically, “Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum?” alongside an image of Ingres’ painting La Grande Odalisque (one of the most famous female nudes of all time) with a gorilla head placed over the original face. The results of the “weenie count” proclaim on the poster that the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s public collections in 1989 showed that women artists had produced less than 5% of the works in the Modern Art Department, while 85% of the nudes were female.

Eventually, the group expanded their focus to take on racism in the art world. They aimed to attract artists of colour in order to fight for greater visibility and respect. Their famed Guerrillas Talk Back collection (1985-1990) included works like We’ve Encouraged Our Galleries To Show More Women And Artists Of Color. Have You?, When Racism and Sexism Are No Longer Fashionable, What Will Your Art Collection Be Worth?, and Only 4 Commercial Galleries In NY Show Black Women. 

Since the 1990s, the Guerrilla Girls have continued to interrupt and protest inequality and injustice within artistic institutions and politics. Most recently and notably they attended the 2016 Women’s March, carrying signs and distributing pamphlets proclaiming President Trump’s New Commemorative Months.

Additionally, they have focused more energy on the corruption within museum boards through recent controversies such as multiple museum’s ties to the Sackler family, who have actively contributed to the American opioid crisis, and the MoMA trustees’ involvement with Jeffrey Epstein.