Guerrilla Girls
1985–
The Guerrilla Girls collective of female artists came together in the 1980s to condemn the bias that women and people of color faced in the art world. At the time, American museums mounted few exhibitions of female artists and rarely acquired women’s art for their collections. Wearing gorilla masks—their trademark— the Guerrilla Girls demonstrated in front of New York museums. They also created posters using statistical research to reveal pervasive sexism and racism in the arts and culture. Their famous poster asking, “Do women have to be naked to get into the Met Museum?” pointed out that while only 5 percent of works in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art were by women artists, 85 percent of the nudes in the collection were female.
The Clocktower Gallery, an alternative art space in lower Manhattan, invited the Guerrilla Girls to mount a response to the 1987 Whitney Biennial. The gallery had noticed that only 24 percent of the works featured were by women artists. In Guerrilla Girls Review the Whitney—a poster publicizing the Clocktower show—the female figure in a gorilla mask points a finger at the phallic symbol of a banana in her other hand.
The Guerrilla Girls have continued their work to the present day, employing similar tactics even as their anonymous membership has changed. They have been instrumental in encouraging art museums to rethink established narratives about modern art, and to focus more rigorously on collecting and exhibiting work that more accurately reflects the diversity of artists today.
