Guerilla Girls

Who are the Guerrilla Girls?

In 1984, The Museum of Modern Art in New York opened an exhibition titled An International Survey of Painting and Sculpture (MOMA_1984 press release.pdf Links to an external site.). It was supposed to be an up-to-the minute summary of the most significant contemporary art in the world. Out of 169 artists, only 13 were women.

In reaction, Guerrilla Girls Links to an external site., an anonymous group of feminist, female artists devoted to fighting sexism and racism within the art world, protested the exhibition and began their current mission of bringing gender and racial inequality within the fine arts to light

Describing the impetus for their movement, “We decided to find out how bad it was. After about 5 minutes of research we found that it was worse than we thought: the most influential galleries and museums exhibited almost no women artists. When we showed the figures around, some said it was an issue of quality, not prejudice. Others admitted there was discrimination, but considered the situation hopeless. Everyone in positions of power curators, critics, collectors, the artists themselves passed the buck. The artists blamed the dealers, the dealers blamed the collectors, the collectors blamed the critics, and so on. We decided to embarrass each group by showing their records in public. Those were the first posters we put up in the streets of SoHo in New York.”