Art world
Throughout their existence, the Guerrilla Girls have gained the most attention for their bold protest art.[18] The Guerrilla Girls' projects (mostly posters at first) express observations, concerns, and ideals regarding numerous social topics. Their art has always been fact-driven, and informed by the group's unique approach to data collection, such as "weenie counts." To be more inclusive and to make their posters more eye-catching, the Guerrilla Girls tend to pair facts with humorous images[19] – a form of word art.[20] Although the Guerrilla Girls gained fame for wheat-pasting provocative campaign posters around New York City, the group has also enjoyed public commissions and indoor exhibitions.
In addition to posting posters around downtown Manhattan, they passed out thousands of small handbills based on their designs at various events. The first posters were mainly black and white fact sheets, highlighting inequalities between male and female artists with regard to a number of exhibitions, gallery representation, and pay. Their posters revealed how sexist the art world was in comparison to other industries and to national averages. For example, in 1985 they printed a poster showing that the salary gap in the art world between men and women was starker than the United States average, proclaiming "Women in America earn only 2/3 of what men do. Women artists earn only 1/3 of what men do." These early posters often targeted specific galleries and artists. Another 1985 poster listed the names of some of the most famous working artists, such as Bruce Nauman and Richard Serra. The poster asked "What do these artists have in common?" with the answer "They allow their work to be shown in galleries that show no more than 10% of women or none at all."
The group was also activists for equal representation of women in institutional art, and highlighted artist Louise Bourgeois in their "Advantages to Being a Women artist", poster in 1988 as one line read, "Knowing your career might not pick up till after you're 80."[21] Their pieces are also notable for their use of combative statements such as "When racism and sexism are no longer fashionable, what will your art collection be worth?"[12]
"Dearest Art Collector" (1986) is a 560x430 mm screen-print on paper. This is one of thirty posters published in a portfolio entitled "Guerrilla Girls Talk Back".[22] This print is unusual in the portfolio in that it takes the form of an enlarged handwritten letter on baby pink paper. The extremely rounded cursive script crowned with a frowning flower exudes femininity, symbolizing the biting sarcasm for which the Guerrilla Girls were known. The Guerrilla Girls sent this poster to well-known art collectors across the United States, pointing out how few works they owned by women artists. This send-up of femininity is aimed at the expectation that, even when presenting a serious complaint, women should do so in a socially acceptable 'nice' way. "We know that you feel terrible about this" appeals to the feelings of the recipient. This piece was a commentary on how hard it is for female artists, and what lengths they must go through in order to be recognized and taken seriously. Women are constantly expected to perform a certain way and this print is the embodiment of how tumultuous it is for women all around the world to be recognized in the eyes of men with power. The group later transcribed it into other languages and sent it to collectors outside the U.S. A practical joke with serious implications, this poster is now (somewhat ironically) a collector's item.
"The posters were rude; they named names and they printed statistics (and almost always cited the source of those statistics at the bottom, making them difficult to dismiss). They embarrassed people. In other words, they worked.[23]"
The Guerrilla Girls' first color poster, which remains the group's most iconic image, is the 1989 Metropolitan Museum poster, which used data from the group's first "weenie count". In response to the overwhelming number of female nudes counted in the modern art sections, the poster asks, sarcastically, "Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum?". Next to the text is an image of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres's painting Grande Odalisque (1814, Louvre Museum). The Guerrilla Girls placed a gorilla mask over the head of Ingres' nude, which is one of the most famous female nudes in Western art. The New York Public Art Fund had rejected the Guerrilla Girls' Metropolitan Museum poster for a billboard they had commissioned from the group. Rather than change the image, the group bought advertising space from the MTA, and the poster traversed lower Manhattan on New York City buses, until the MTA declined to renew their contract (evidently because they thought the fan handle looked phallic).[3] In 2021, the Metropolitan Museum poster was donated to the Met, and in 2021–22, it was featured in the exhibition Prints: Revolution, Resistance, and Activism.[3]
A 2005 Guerrilla Girl recount at the Met found that only 3% of the exhibited artists in the modern section were women, whereas the nude females constituted 83% of the nudes in those galleries. The 2012 Guerrilla Girl poster reported 4% women artists, and a figure of 76% female nudes, reflecting a lower percentage of women artists and female nudes from 1985.[3] A survey of other sections of the Metropolitan Museum gives different results. Art critic Christopher Allen states that proportionately more female artists and fewer nudes are in the 18th century section,[24] and Mary Beard writes in her 2018 book, Civilisations: How Do We Look, that it took centuries in Greek antiquity until Praxiteles created the first female nude, Aphrodite of Knidos.[25]
In 1990, the group designed a billboard featuring the Mona Lisa that was placed along the West Side Highway supported by the New York City Public Art Fund.[26] Stickers also became a popular calling cards representative of the group.
The Guerrilla Girls infiltrated the bathrooms of the newly opened Guggenheim Museum SoHo, placing stickers regarding female inequality on the walls. In 1998, Guerrilla Girls West protested at the San José Museum of Art, over low representation of women artists.[27]
In addition to researching and exposing sexism in the art world, the Guerrilla Girls have received commissions from numerous organizations and institutions, such as The Nation (2001),[28] Fundación Bilbao Arte (2002), Istanbul Modern (2006) and Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art (2007). They have also partnered with Amnesty International, contributing pieces to a show under the organization's "Protect the Human" initiative.[29]
They were interviewed for the film !Women Art Revolution.[30]
In 1987, the Guerrilla Girls published thirty posters in a portfolio entitled Guerrilla Girls Talk Back.[31] One specifically, We Sell White Bread,[32] was a poster made to gradually widen their focus, tackling issues of racial discrimination in the art world and also making more direct, politicized interventions.[33][32] In 1987, the image on this poster was first seen as peel-off stickers on gallery windows and doors in New York.[34] Its medium, screen print on paper, has the words "We Sell White Bread" and are stamped on a slice of white bread alongside a list of ingredients that includes the white male artists whose work is on display at the galleries.[33][32] According to the poster, the galleries favored white, male artists, noting that the gallery "contains less than the minimum daily requirement of white women and non-whites".
Politics and social issues
Although the Guerrilla Girls' protest art directed at the art world remains their most well-known work, throughout their existence the group has periodically targeted politicians, specifically conservative Republicans. Those criticized have included George Bush, Newt Gingrich, and most recently Michele Bachmann. In 1991, the Artist and Homeless Collaborative invited them to work with homeless women to create posters in response to homelessness and the first Gulf War. Between 1992 and 1994, Guerrilla Girl posters addressed the 1992 presidential election, reproductive rights (done for the march on Washington in 1992), gay and lesbian rights, and the 1992 Los Angeles riots. During the 2012 election, they displayed their ''Even Michele Bachman believes. ... '' on a billboard adjacent to a football stadium to advertise her plan to: ban same-sex marriages, require voter ID checks, and spend money implementing statewide voter IDs.<[58] Their 2013 posters discussed the Homeland Terror Alert system and Arnold Schwarzenegger's gubernatorial campaign.
In 2016, the Guerrilla Girls launched the "President Trump Announces New Commemorative Months" campaign in the form of stickers and posters, which they distributed during the Women's March on Washington in Los Angeles and New York City, as well as the J20 event at the Whitney Museum of Art<[59]
