Guerrilla Girls - Taylor Martin

The Guerrilla Girls is an anonymous social justice protest group founded in 1985 that is still going strong today. Their main goal is to “fight discrimination against women artists and artists of color in the art world”.1 As time has gone on, they have expanded their protests out to other social issues, such as ones in regard to gender and sexual identity. They are known as the Guerrilla Girls due to their “ ‘guerrilla’ tactics to expose gender and racial imbalances within contemporary cultural institutions.”2 The term “guerrilla” is often used in reference to guerrilla warfare, which are tactics that involve avoiding head-on confrontation with the enemy. In the usual meaning enemies refer to other armies, while with the Guerrilla Girls that means contemporary cultural institutions like museums, libraries, art galleries, archives, and more. They garner these institutions attention through provocative posters, “billboards, performances, protests, lectures, installations, and limited-edition prints”.3 While all of this work is being done, the protestors don the masks of gorillas, tying the world guerrilla into their public image along side their rebel tactics. The Guerrilla Girls “grew out of a demonstration in 1985 by a group of women artists protesting an exhibition titled An International Survey of Painting and Sculpture.”1 This exhibition in New York grabbed this groups attention due to the drastic difference in the number of male artists, female artists, and artists of color in the show. There were 148 male artists, thirteen women, and zero artists of color. The show’s curator also said “that any artist who wasn't in the show should rethink ‘his’ career.”1 Which clearly shows the lack of attention or care for women artists in the art world. Their protesting at this show, however, drew little to no attention to them, so they set out to make a name for themselves. Today, many of their art works of protest are conspicuous and renowned. Once they were tied only to the streets of New York, now they “maintain an online presence and present public lectures and performances around the world.”2 Three main pieces will be formally addressed, one of them being "Dearest Art Collector" (1986). (Fig 1.) This is one of the first pieces the Guerrilla Girls made after forming their group. It reads: “Dearest art collector, it has come to our attention that your collection, like most, does not contain enough art by women. We know that you feel terrible about this and will rectify the situation immediately. All our love, Guerrilla Girls”. This was a poster that was mass produced and sent to well-known art collectors throughout New York. It is screenprint on paper and has dimensions of 560 by 430 millimeters, or about twenty-two by seventeen inches. It takes the likeness of a large, handwritten letter, and is written in “curly, girlie handwriting on a pink [back]ground; a drawing of a flower with a sad face heads it while the Girls’ PO Box address is printed at the foot.”4 This piece was copy and printed fifty times in a portfolio titled Guerrilla Girls Talk Back, the one shown in Figure one is the twelfth edition owned by Tate Modern.

Figure 1 Guerrilla Girls, Dearest Art Collector, poster, 1986. The next piece is titled "Do women have to be naked to get Into the Met. Museum?" (1989). (Fig 2.) This work is one of the Guerrilla Girls more popular pieces, which garnered it to get reprinted as posters by the group in 2005 and 2012, with it’s initial release being in 1989. It was commissioned by the Public Art Fund in New York to be a billboard, but was rejected due to their claim of the are piece having a lack of clarity. The group decided to use this piece on New York City buses. As stated before, the poster was well renowned, that is because of “its bold, eye-catching graphic design, which includes a reproduction of the female nude figure from French artist Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres's painting Grande Odalisque (1814, in the collection of Musée du Louvre, Paris) donning a gorilla mask.”5 The piece has a chromatic cadmium yellow background, with the aforementioned female nude figure in black and white, with a magenta fabric bunched beneath her and clutched in her right hand. There is bold black text on the top of the work, donning the title of the piece itself. Below that, to the right of the figure, a statistic was written. It reads: “Less than 5% of the artists in the Modern Art Sections are women, but 85% of the nudes are female.” This is in a smaller text compared to the title, with key words, such as 5%, artists, 85%, and nudes, being highlighted in a similar shade of magenta as the fabric. Below this statistic, in an even smaller font, is the groups PO Box address along with their name. The dimensions of the posters are 280 by 710 millimeters or about eleven by twenty-eight inches.

Figure 2 Guerrilla Girls, Do women have to be naked to get Into the Met. Museum?, poster, 1989. The final work is "How Many Women Had One-person Exhibitions At NYC Museums Last Year?" (2015). (Fig 3.) This art work was first made in 1985 (left), and was later redone in 2015 (right) to show the change, or rather lack thereof, there has been in the past thirty years in how many women had one-person exhibitions at New York City museums. The piece has a color palette of black, white, and a stark red. The piece is split evenly in half, the left side containing a white background with black text, with the enlarged red and circled date of 1985 in the bottom right corner. The right consists of a black background with white lettering, the enlarged red date reading 2015; it is composed the same way as the red text of “1985”. The text on both sides consists of the pieces title as the headline in a large font while the names of the museums lay below in a smaller font. Each of the four museums listed on each side have a number to their right, indicating the answer to the titles question. On the right side however, the numbers stated on the left are repeated, yet this time they are crossed out with a red line and replaced with the updated red numbers to match the statistics for 2015. The dimensions for this poster is ten by twenty-six inches.

Figure 3 Guerrilla Girls, How Many Women Had One-person Exhibitions at NYC Museums Last Year?, poster, 2015. 1 = Guerrilla Girls Archive (Getty Research Institute) 2 = Guerrilla Girls | Artist Profile | NMWA 3 = The Guerrilla Girls Art, Bio, Ideas | TheArtStory 4 = ‘Dearest Art Collector‘, Guerrilla Girls, 1986 | Tate 5 = Guerrilla Girls | Do Women Have To Be Naked To Get Into the Met. Museum? | The Metropolitan Museum of Art (metmuseum.org)