The Guerrilla Girls: Feminism Through Art
Did you know that less than 5% of the artists in the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art are women, but 85% of the nudes are female? The Guerrilla Girls brought this statistic to the attention of the world in 1989 — and these statistics unfortunately haven’t changed much since then.
“The Guerrilla Girls are anonymous artist activists who use disruptive headlines, outrageous visuals and killer statistics to expose gender and ethnic bias and corruption in art, film, politics and pop culture.”
This group of feminist artists was founded in 1985, and they’re still active today! This 4min video from the New York Times goes over what they are about and interviews some of the members for their 30th anniversary in 2015:
Here is an example of one of their most famous posters from 1989: (“the poster that started it all”)
Aren’t these statistics crazy?! Their flashy posters are probably what they’re most known for, but that’s not all that they do:
As evocative as their animal faces and sticker crusades were, the Guerrilla Girls’ greatest contribution may have been in something simpler: the act of counting. They were not the first artists to employ data in their work, but they were among the most visible, and direct.
KAHLO One Sunday morning [in 1989], a group of us went to the Metropolitan Museum with little notebooks. We were going to count naked bodies and female artists. It was only when we hit the 19th century, that early modern period, when sex replaced religion as the major preoccupation of European artists, did we get our statistic: Only 5 percent of the artists were women, but 85 percent of the nudes are female.
They repeated the count in the modern wings at the Met in 2005 and 2012, and the numbers were hardly different. Other posters enumerated the number of women in solo shows in the city’s major museums (zero or one each in 1985; 1 to 2 in 2015) and blue-chip galleries.
Through their own art, they advocated for decreased discrimination against women artists and artists of color. Their statistics and posters sought to bring attention to the inequity of gender and race in the art world.
This article from the New York Times (where the video & quotes are from) includes more details and interviews with the members.
To learn more about the Guerrilla Girls and their activism in the past and today, check out their website! Here is also a link of the different projects they’ve done over the years.