![]() | |
Formation | 1985 |
---|---|
Headquarters | New York City, United States |
Region served | Worldwide |
Official language | English |
Website | guerrillagirls |
Guerrilla Girls is an anonymous group of feminist, female artists devoted to fighting sexism and racism within the art world. [1] The group formed in New York City in 1985, born out of a picket against the Museum of Modern Art the previous year. The core of the group's work is bringing gender and racial inequality into focus within the greater arts community and society at large. [2] The Guerrilla Girls employ culture jamming in the form of posters, books, billboards, lectures, interviews, public appearances and internet interventions to expose disparities, discrimination, and corruption (the latter includes conflicts of interest within museums). They also often use humor in their work to make their serious messages engaging. [3] [4] The Guerrilla Girls are known for their "guerrilla" tactics, hence their name, such as hanging up posters or staging surprise exhibitions. [4] To remain anonymous, members don gorilla masks. To permit individual identities in interviews, they use pseudonyms that refer to deceased female artists such as Frida Kahlo, Käthe Kollwitz, and Alice Neel, as well as writers and activists, such as Gertrude Stein and Harriet Tubman. [3] According to GG1, identities are concealed because issues matter more than individual identities, "Mainly, we wanted the focus to be on the issues, not on our personalities or our own work." [5]
During the height of the contemporary art movement in the late 20th century, many distinguished galleries lacked appropriate representation of female artists and curators. Museums were often privately funded by elites, predominately white males, meaning that museums were documenting power structures rather than art. [6] Historically, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, like other major museums, had an entirely male or a predominantly male board of directors. It had a paucity of female artists on display, while, at the same time, art featuring female nudes were plentiful. The Guerrilla Girls were formed in 1985 with the purpose of exposing gender disparities in the contemporary art world. Initially, it did not plan to be a permanent organization. Its first press release, dated May 6, addressed its "campaign throughout the next weeks and next season." [3] Membership in the group has fluctuated over the years from a high of about 30 women to a handful of active members in 2015 [7] According to Frida Kahlo, there have been a total of 65 members. [3]
In the spring of 1985, seven women launched the Guerrilla Girls in response to the Museum of Modern Art's exhibition "An International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture" (1984), whose roster of 165 artists included only 13 women. [3] [8] Inaugurating MoMA's newly renovated and expanded building, this exhibition claimed to survey that era's most important painters and sculptors from 17 countries. [9] The proportion of artists of color was even smaller (one account puts the number at eight), and none of them were women. [3] [10]
Comments attributed to the show's curator, Kynaston McShine highlight that era's explicit art world gender bias: "Kynaston McShine gave interviews saying that any artist who wasn't in the show should rethink his career." [11] However, it has been suggested that these putative quotes stem from comments in an interview McShine gave to the New York Times before the exhibition opened: “I think that some people can benefit from not being in the show.” He continued: “They will have to think about their work.” [3] In reaction to the low proportion of women in the exhibition and McShine's bias, the Women's Caucus for the Arts led a protest with pickets across the street from MoMA. Seven future members of the Guerrilla Girls participated in this protest, but when their pickets were ignored, some of the women began to seek what Frida Kahlo calls "a more media-savvy" method of reaching the public. [3]
The MoMA protest's lack of success in 1984 led to strategy meetings, which resulted in the formation of the Guerrilla Girls. The initial founding members were all White. [3] The Guerrilla Girls conveyed their messages by wheat-pasted posters in downtown Manhattan, particularly in the SoHo and East Village neighborhoods, which were home to both artists and the commercial galleries that served as their initial targets. [3] [12]
When asked about the masks, the girls answer "We were Guerrillas before we were Gorillas. From the beginning, the press wanted publicity photos. We needed a disguise. No one remembers, for sure, how we got our fur, but one story is that at an early meeting, an original girl, a bad speller, wrote 'Gorilla' instead of 'Guerrilla'. It was an enlightened mistake. It gave us our 'mask-ulinity'." [13] In an interview with the magazine Interview the Guerrilla Girls were quoted, "Anonymous free speech is protected by the Constitution. You'd be surprised what comes out of your mouth when you wear a mask." [14]
A year after its founding, the group expanded its focus to include racism in the art world, attracting artists of color. [3] They also took on projects outside of New York, enabling them to address sexism and racism nationally and internationally. Though the art world has remained the group's main focus, the Guerrilla Girls' agenda has included sexism and racism in films, mass and popular culture, and politics. Tokenism also represents a major group concern. [12]
Periodically, the Guerrilla Girls conducted "weenie" and "banana" counts, wherein members visited institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art and counted nudes, noting the ration of male-to-female subjects, as well as the ratio of male-to-female artists represented in the various collections. Data gathered from their survey in the Met in 1989 showed that women artists had produced less than 5% of the works in the Modern Art galleries, while 85% of the nudes were female. [3]
Early organizing was based around meetings, during which members evaluated statistical data gathered regarding gender inequality within the New York City's art scene. The Guerrilla Girls also worked closely with artists, encouraging them to speak to those within the community to bridge the gender gap where they perceived it. [15]
Since 1985, the Guerrilla Girls have worked for an increased awareness of sexism and greater accountability on the part of curators, art dealers, collectors, and critics. [16] The group is credited, above all, with sparking dialogue, and bringing national and international attention to issues of sexism and racism within the arts.
Many feminist artists in the 1970s dared to imagine that female artists could produce authentically and radically different art, undoing the prevailing visual paradigm. The pioneering feminist critic, Lucy Lippard curated an all-women exhibition in 1974, effectively protesting what most deemed a deeply flawed approach, that of merely assimilating women into the prevailing art system. [17] Shaped by the 1970s women's movement, the Guerrilla Girls resolved to devise new strategies. Most noticeably, they realized that 1970s-era tools such as pickets and marches proved ineffective, as evidenced by how easily MoMA could ignore 200 protestors from the Women's Caucus for Art. "We had to have a new image and a new kind of language to appeal to a younger generation of women", recalls one of the founding Guerrilla Girls, who goes by "Liubov Popova." [18] The Guerrilla Girls sought an alternative approach, one that would defeat views of the 1970s Feminist movements as man-hating, anti-maternal, strident, and humorless: [17] Versed in poststructuralist theories, they adopted 1970s initiatives, but with a different language and style. Earlier feminists tackled grim and unfunny issues such as sexual violence, inspiring the Guerrilla Girls to keep their spirits intact by approaching their work with wit and laughter, thus preventing a backlash. [17]
Throughout their existence, the Guerrilla Girls have gained the most attention for their bold protest art. [19] 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 [20] – a form of word art. [21] 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. [15] 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." [22] 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". [23] 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. [24]
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, [25] 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 . [26]
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. [27] 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. [15] In 1998, Guerrilla Girls West protested at the San José Museum of Art, over low representation of women artists. [28]
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), [29] 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. [30]
They were interviewed for the film !Women Art Revolution . [31]
In 1987, the Guerrilla Girls published thirty posters in a portfolio entitled Guerrilla Girls Talk Back. [32] One specifically, We Sell White Bread, [33] 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. [34] [33] In 1987, the image on this poster was first seen as peel-off stickers on gallery windows and doors in New York. [35] 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. [34] [33] 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". [34] [35]
In 2005, the group exhibited large-format posters Welcome to the Feminist Biennale at the Venice Biennale (the first in 110 years to be overseen by women), scrutinizing 101 years of Biennale history in terms of diversity. Where Are the Women Artists of Venice? explored the fact that most works owned by Venice's historical museums are kept in storage. [36] [37] [38]
Since 2005, the Guerrilla Girls have been invited to produce special projects for international institutions, sometimes for the very institutions, they have criticized. Offers that pose a dilemma are carefully considered, so as to avoid censure since one way to improve institutions is to criticize them from inside. [39]
Their 2006 poster The Future for Turkish Women Artists as Revealed by the Guerrilla Girls, commissioned by İstanbul Modern, demonstrated that the status of women artists in Turkey was better than in the rest of Europe.[ citation needed ] In 2007, The Washington Post published their "Horror on the National Mall!", a one-page newspaper spread attacking the absence of diversity among tax-payer supported museums on the Mall in Washington, DC. [40] During the 2007 ART-ATHINA, the Guerrilla Girls projected "Dear Art Collector" in Greek onto the entrance's façade. In 2015, they projected their "Dear Art Collector" animation onto a museum façade, taking on collectors who fail to pay employees a living wage. [41] To commemorate the 20th Anniversary of the École Polytechnique massacre, the University of Quebec commissioned their Troubler Le Repos (Disturbing The Peace) poster, whose texts addressed anti-women hate speech since Ancient Greece to Rush Limbaugh.
In 2009, they launched I'm not a feminist, but If I were this is what I'd complain about ... , an interactive graffiti wall that enables women who don't see themselves as feminists the means to target gender issues with the hope that active participation will broaden their perspectives. [42] In 2012, this traveled to Krakòw's Art Boom Festival. [43]
In 2011, Columbia College Chicago's Glass Curtain Gallery and Institute for Women and Gender in the Arts and Media commissioned the first Guerrilla Girls survey of Chicago museums. The resulting banner entitled Chicago Museums [Guerrilla Girls to Museums: Time for Gender Reassignment!] critiqued gender disparity in the contemporary art collections of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Contemporary Art. [44]
In 2012, an advertising truck towed Do women Have To Be Naked To Get into Boston Museums? around Boston. [45] Invited by Yoko Ono to participate in the 2013 Meltdown Festival, the Guerrilla Girls updated their 2003 Estrogen Bomb poster, which had premiered in The Village Voice in 2003.
During Winter 2016, they participated in "Twin City Takeover", art exhibitions and art projects organized by a consortium of local art organizations sited around Minneapolis and St. Paul. [46] [47] [48] [49] [50]
In 1996 Guerrilla Girls came out with Planet Pussy in Monkey Business issue #4 in November 1996. [51] This was a work about feminism and was published by Sike Burmeister and Sabine Schmidt. [52]
To protest the dearth of female directors, the Guerrilla Girls distributed stickers during the 2001 Sundance Film Festival. [53] The Nation invited them to present Birth of Feminism, [29] which they updated and presented in 2007 as a banner outside Witte de With Center for Contemporary Arts. Since 2002, Guerrilla Girls Inc. have designed and installed billboards during the Oscars that address white male dominance in the film industry, such as: "Anatomically Correct Oscars", "Even the Senate is More Progressive than Hollywood", "The Birth of Feminism", [54] "Unchain the Women Directors". [55]
During the 2015 Reykjavík Arts Festival, the Guerrilla Girls displayed National Film Quiz, a billboard criticizing the fact that 87% of national funding for films goes to men, despite women playing an important part of Iceland's public and private sectors. [56] In light of 2016's #Oscarssowhite campaign, the Guerrilla Girls updated the above billboards, presenting them on downtown Minneapolis streets for "Twin City Takeover". [57]
In 2023, the Guerrilla Girls were featured in the episode "Bodies of Knowledge of the American streaming series Art in the Twenty-First Century, season 11., in which they presented a new body of work. [58]
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),[ clarification needed ] 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. [59] 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 [60] and the Fire Fink protest at MoMA. [61]
To shed light on inequality in the art world, the Guerrilla Girls have published numerous books. In 1995, they published their first book, Confessions of the Guerrilla Girls, a compilation of 50 works plus a self-interview. [62] [63] In 1998, they published The Guerrilla Girls Bedside Companion to the History of Western Art, a consciousness-raising comic book that sold 82,000 copies, as it explores how art history's male domination constrained several female artists' careers. [64] In 2003, they published Bitches, Bimbos and Ballbreakers, a down and dirty catalogue of "The Top Stereotypes from Cradle to Grave". Offering thumbnail histories for cultural clichés ranging from "Daddy's Girl", "the Girl Next Door", "the Bimbo/Dumb Blonde" to "the Bitch/Ballbreaker", each is given "trademark Guerrilla Girl treatment: pointed factoids and cool graphics". [65] [66]
Their 2004 book The Guerrilla Girl's Museum Activity Book (reissued in 2012) parodies children's museum activity books. Meant to teach children how to both appreciate and critique museums, this book provides activities that reveal the problematic aspects of museum culture and major museum collections. In 2009, they produced a history of hysteria, The Hysterical Herstory Of Hysteria And How It Was Cured From Ancient Times Until Now. [67] MFC-Michèle Didier published it in 2016.
An important part of Guerrilla Girls' outreach since 1985 has been presentations and workshops at colleges, universities, art organizations, and sometimes at museums. The presentations, known as "gigs", attract hundreds and sometimes thousands of attendees. In the gig, they play music, videos, show slides and talk about the history of their work, how it has evolved. In the end, the GGs interact with audience members. New work is always included and gig material changes all the time. They have done hundreds of these events and have traveled to nearly every state as well as Europe, South America, and Australia.
In recognition of their work, the Guerrilla Girls have been invited to give talks at world-renowned museums, including a presentation at the MoMA's 2007 "Feminist Futures" Symposium. They have also been invited to speak at art schools and universities across the globe and gave a 2010 commencement speech at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. To mark the 30th anniversary of the Guerrilla Girls, Matadero Madrid hosted "Guerrilla Girls: 1985-2015", an exhibition featuring most of the collective's production accompanied by a series of events including a talk/performance by Guerrilla Girl members Frida Kahlo and Käthe Kollwitz. [68] [69] The exhibition also showed the 1992 documentary "Guerrilla in Our Midst" by Amy Harrison. [70] [71]
Three Guerrilla Girls appeared on the Stephen Colbert show on January 14, 2016. [72] [73]
Early solo exhibitions included: "The Night the Palladium Apologized" (1985), Palladium (New York City); "Guerrilla Girls Review the Whitney" (1987), Clocktower PS1; and "Guerrilla Girls" (1995), Printed Matter, Inc. [74]
Career surveys include:
On the heels of "Not Ready to Make Nice" were:
Despite having routinely challenged art institutions to display more artists of color, both members and critics want the Guerrilla Girls to be more diverse. Their art was believed to be exclusive to white feminism and they addressed by creating a series of activist artworks addressing a range of issues that women faced. [79] "Zora Neale Hurston" recalls Guerrilla Girl membership as "mostly white" and largely mirroring the art world demographics that they critiqued. [80] Despite sporting gorilla masks to downplay personal identity, some members attribute Guerrilla Girl interests to the fact that de facto leaders "Frida Kahlo" and "Käthe Kollwitz" are both white. [17] ("Frida Kahlo" has also been criticized for her appropriation of a Latina artist's name.) [81] The artist believed in the overt artistic expression by correlating beauty and pain, along with the rise of modernism. [82] An art movement without generalization.
However, any precise information on the demographics of the Guerrilla Girls is impossible, for they have "staunchly, and problematically, resisted being surveyed as to the makeup of their own membership". [17]
Several Guerrilla Girls who are people of color have faced numerous challenges. Despite the Guerrilla Girls' stance against tokenism, some artists of color abandoned Guerrilla Girl membership due to tokenism, silencing, disrespect, and whitewashing. [17] [80] As a woman of color, "Alma Thomas" describes having felt uncomfortable wearing the Guerrilla Girls' signature gorilla mask. [83] "Thomas" recalls little effort being devoted to understanding the challenges of artists of color. "Their whiteness was such that they ... didn't understand that blacks were being put in a completely separate world in the art world, that black male artists and black female artists are completely separated, completely segregated to this day." [80] Ultimately, this widespread antagonism led to many "artists of color [leaving] after a few meetings because they could sense the unspoken hierarchy in the group". [84]
Emerging at the tail end of the second-wave feminist movement, the Guerrilla Girls navigated the differences between established and emerging feminist theory during the 1980s. "Alma Thomas" describes this grey-area that the Guerrilla Girls occupied as "universalist feminism", bordering on essentialism. [83] Art historian Anna Chave considers the Guerrilla Girls' essentialism much more profound, leading the group to be "assailed by ... a rising generation of women wise in the ways of poststructuralist theory, for [their] putative naiveté and susceptibility to essentialism". [17] Essentialist views are most clearly exhibited in two Guerrilla Girl books:The Guerrilla Girls Bedside Companion to the History of Western Art (1998) and the controversial Estrogen Bomb (2003–13) campaign. Regarding the former, "Alma Thomas" worried that The Guerrilla Girls Bedside Companion to the History of Western Art "was so embedded in that second-wave feminist and even pre-second-wave essentialism" that it fulfilled some assumption that all women artists are feminist artists. [83]
Students at Minneapolis College of Art and Design criticized their Estrogen Bomb poster campaign, describing it as insensitive towards transgender people since it ties the female gender to estrogen, the same sort of essentialist link the Guerrilla Girls aim to critique. [85] [86] Aside from essentialism, the Guerrilla Girls have also been critiqued for failing to integrate intersectionality into their work. [81]
Leading up to a highly publicized 2003 lawsuit, there was increasing animosity toward "Frida Kahlo" and "Käthe Kollwitz". Despite founding members' initial intention to create a non-hierarchal, equitable power structure, there was an increasing sense that two people were making "the final decisions no matter what you said". [80] Several Guerrilla Girls felt that their second book, The Guerrilla Girls Bedside Companion to the History of Western Art, [87] primarily represented the views of "Kahlo" and "Kollwitz". Some even felt that "Kahlo" and "Kollwitz" completely controlled the book, despite their having selected material created collectively by all Guerrilla Girls. There was even suspicion that these two not only claimed all the credit but took all of the profits. Some members condemned the book as "undemocratic and ... against the spirit of the [Guerrilla] Girls". [83]
As the Guerilla Girls gained in popularity, tensions led to what the Girls later called the "banana split", as five members actually split from the collective. Soon after several members stepped aside to form Guerrilla Girls Broadband, "Kahlo" and "Kollwitz" moved to trademark the name "Guerrilla Girls, Inc." to distinguish their realm from those of Guerrilla Girls BroadBand and Guerrilla Girls On Tour! whose focus is discrimination in the theater world. [84] Even though their former colleague "Gertrude Stein" was in the on-tour group, "Kahlo" and "Kollwitz" charged them with copyright and trademark infringement and unjust enrichment. Many members of the group felt especially betrayed that "Kahlo" and "Kollwitz" had launched their lawsuit under their real names, Jerilea Zempel and Erika Rothenberg. [88]
This prompted negative reactions from both current and former Guerrilla Girls, who objected to "Kahlo" and "Kollwitz" claiming responsibility for having created the collective effort, as well as the flippancy with which they exchanged their anonymity for legal standing. [17]
Judge Louis L. Stanton, who handled the case, rejected the "bizarre" suggestion that defendants sporting gorilla masks be allowed to testify in his courtroom. He also stated that "Mundane court procedures for adjudicating legal rights and the ownership of property require direct and cross-examination of real persons with real addresses and attributes." [88]
In their 45-page complaint, "Kahlo" and "Kollwitz" described themselves as the group's "guiding forces", even though the Guerrilla Girls were "informally organized, [and] had no official hierarchy". Initially, they asked the court to stop Guerrilla Girls Broadband from calling themselves Guerrilla Girls and sought millions of dollars in damages. In 2006, they settled with the theatre group who agreed to go by Guerrilla Girls on Tour. As of 2013, three separate groups remained active, the GuerrillaGirlsBroadBand, Inc., Guerrilla Girls On Tour, Inc. (the Theatre Girls), and Guerrilla Girls, Inc. The Guerrilla Girls BroadBand focuses on the internet as its "natural habitat". [89]
Upon their 1985 debut, the Guerrilla Girls were "lauded by the very establishment they sought to undermine". They have since exhibited at Tate Modern, Venice Biennale, Centre Pompidou, and MoMA, which additionally grants them a broader audience for their concerns. [90] Since then, this relationship has only intensified, as the Guerrilla Girls presented their exhibitions in museums and even allowed their works to be collected by hegemonic institutions. Although some have questioned the efficacy, if not hypocrisy, of the group's working within the system that they originally denigrated, few would challenge their decision to let the Getty Research Institute house their archives. [81] [ failed verification ] [90]
Membership in the New York City group is exclusive, by invitation only, based on relationships with current and past members, and one's involvement in the contemporary art world. A mentoring program was formed within the group, pairing a new member with an experienced Guerrilla Girl to bring them into the fold. Due to the lack of formality, the group is comfortable with individuals outside of their base claiming to be Guerrilla Girls; Guerrilla Girl 1 stated in a 2007 interview: "It can only enhance us by having people of power who have been given credit for being a Girl, even if they were never a Girl." Men are not allowed to become Guerrilla Girls but may support the group by assisting in promotional activities. [15]
Guerrilla Girls' names are pseudonyms generally based on dead female artists. Members go by names such as Käthe Kollwitz, Alma Thomas, Rosalba Carriera, Frida Kahlo, Alice Neel, Julia de Burgos, and Hannah Höch. Guerrilla Girls' "Carriera" is credited with the idea of using pseudonyms as a way to not forget female artists. Having read about Rosalba Carriera in a footnote of Letters on Cézanne by Rainer Maria Rilke, she decided to pay tribute to the little-known female artist with her name. This also helped to solve the problem of media interviews; the group was often interviewed by phone and would not give names, causing problems and confusion amongst the group and the media. Guerrilla Girl 1 joined in the late 1980s, taking on her name as a way to memorialize women in the art community who have fallen under the radar and did not make as notable as an impact as the names takes on by other members. [15] For some members like "Zora Neale Hurston", or Emma Amos, identities have only been made public posthumously.
The idea to adopt the gorilla as the group's symbol stemmed from a spelling error. One of the first Guerrilla Girls accidentally spelled the group's name at a meeting as "gorilla". [16] Despite the fact that the idea of using a gorilla as a group symbol might have been accidental, the choice is nevertheless pertinent to the group's overall message in several key ways.
To begin with, the gorilla in popular culture and media is often associated with King Kong, or other images of trapped and tamed apes. In the 2010 SAIC Commencement, the comparison between institutionalized artists and tamed apes was explicitly made:
And last, but not least, be a great ape. In 1917, Franz Kafka wrote a short story titled "A Report to an Academy", in which an ape spoke about what it was like to be taken into captivity by a bunch of educated, intellectual types. The published story ends with the ape tamed and broken by the stultified academics. But in an earlier draft, Kafka tells a different story. The ape ends his report by instructing other apes NOT to allow themselves to be tamed. He says instead: break the bars of your cages, bite a hole through them, squeeze through an opening ... and ask yourself where do YOU want to go [91]
The gorilla is also typically associated with masculinity. The Met Museum poster is in part shocking because of its juxtaposition of the eroticized female odalisque body, and the large, snarling gorilla head. The addition of the head detracts from the male gaze and changes the way in which viewers are able to look at or understand the highly sexualized image. Further, the addition of the gorilla questions and modifies stereotypical notions of female beauty within Western art and popular culture, another stated goal of the Guerrilla Girls.
Guerrilla Girls, who wear the masks of big, hairy, powerful jungle creatures whose beauty is hardly conventional ... believe all animals, large and small, are beautiful in their own way. [92]
Though this goal has never been explicitly stated by the group, in the history of Western art, primates have often been associated with the visual arts, and with the figure of the artist. The idea of ars simia naturae ("art the ape of nature") maintains that the job of art is to "ape", or faithfully copy and represent nature. This was an idea first popularized by Renaissance thinker Giovanni Boccaccio who alleged that "the artist in imitating nature only follows Nature's own command". [93]
The group Ridykeulous overwrote the 1988 Gorilla Girls' poster The Advantages of Being a Woman Artist with their own messages in 2007.
Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón was a Mexican painter known for her many portraits, self-portraits, and works inspired by the nature and artifacts of Mexico. Inspired by the country's popular culture, she employed a naïve folk art style to explore questions of identity, postcolonialism, gender, class, and race in Mexican society. Her paintings often had strong autobiographical elements and mixed realism with fantasy. In addition to belonging to the post-revolutionary Mexicayotl movement, which sought to define a Mexican identity, Kahlo has been described as a surrealist or magical realist. She is also known for painting about her experience of chronic pain.
The National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA), located in Washington, D.C., is "the first museum in the world solely dedicated" to championing women through the arts. NMWA was incorporated in 1981 by Wallace and Wilhelmina Holladay. Since opening in 1987, the museum has acquired a collection of more than 6,000 works by more than 1,000 artists, ranging from the 16th century to today. The collection includes works by Mary Cassatt, Alma Woodsey Thomas, Élisabeth Louise Vigée-LeBrun, and Amy Sherald. NMWA also holds the only painting by Frida Kahlo in Washington, D.C., Self-Portrait Dedicated to Leon Trotsky.
Lola Álvarez Bravo was the first Mexican female photographer and a key figure in the post-revolution Mexican renaissance. Known for her high level of skill in composition, her works were seen by her peers as fine art. She was recognized in 1964 with the Premio José Clemente Orozco, by the State of Jalisco, for her contributions to photography and her efforts to preserve the culture of Mexico. Her works are included in the permanent collections of international museums, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.
The feminist art movement in the United States began in the early 1970s and sought to promote the study, creation, understanding and promotion of women's art. First-generation feminist artists include Judy Chicago, Miriam Schapiro, Suzanne Lacy, Judith Bernstein, Sheila de Bretteville, Mary Beth Edelson, Carolee Schneeman, Rachel Rosenthal, and many other women. They were part of the Feminist art movement in the United States in the early 1970s to develop feminist writing and art. The movement spread quickly through museum protests in both New York and Los Angeles, via an early network called W.E.B. that disseminated news of feminist art activities from 1971 to 1973 in a nationally circulated newsletter, and at conferences such as the West Coast Women's Artists Conference held at California Institute of the Arts and the Conference of Women in the Visual Arts, at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, D.C..
Guerrilla Girls On Tour is an anonymous touring theatre company whose mission is to develop activist plays, performance art and street theatre addressing feminism and women's history. Formed when the original Guerrilla Girls split into three separate groups in 2001, Guerrilla Girls On Tour has performed in 17 countries and 39 US states with "Feminists Are Funny," "If You Can Stand the Heat: The History of Women and Food," "Silence is Violence" and "The History of Women in Theatre, Condensed".
Sylvia Sleigh was a Welsh-born naturalised American realist painter who lived and worked in New York City. She is known for her role in the feminist art movement and especially for reversing traditional gender roles in her paintings of nude men, often using conventional female poses from historical paintings by male artists like Diego Vélazquez, Titian, and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. Her most well-known subjects were art critics, feminist artists, and her husband, Lawrence Alloway.
Feminist art is a category of art associated with the feminist movement of the late 1960s and 1970s. Feminist art highlights the societal and political differences women experience in their lives. The goal of this art form is to bring a positive and understanding change to the world, leading to equality or liberation. Media used range from traditional art forms, such as painting, to more unorthodox methods such as performance art, conceptual art, body art, craftivism, video, film, and fiber art. Feminist art has served as an innovative driving force toward expanding the definition of art by incorporating new media and a new perspective.
Grande Odalisque, also known as Une Odalisque or La Grande Odalisque, is an oil painting of 1814 by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres depicting an odalisque, or concubine. Ingres' contemporaries considered the work to signify Ingres' break from Neoclassicism, indicating a shift toward exotic Romanticism.
Miriam Schapiro was a Canadian-born artist based in the United States. She was a painter, sculptor, printmaker, and a pioneer of feminist art. She was also considered a leader of the Pattern and Decoration art movement. Schapiro's artwork blurs the line between fine art and craft. She incorporated craft elements into her paintings due to their association with women and femininity. Schapiro's work touches on the issue of feminism and art: especially in the aspect of feminism in relation to abstract art. Schapiro honed in her domesticated craft work and was able to create work that stood amongst the rest of the high art. These works represent Schapiro's identity as an artist working in the center of contemporary abstraction and simultaneously as a feminist being challenged to represent women's "consciousness" through imagery. She often used icons that are associated with women, such as hearts, floral decorations, geometric patterns, and the color pink. In the 1970s she made the hand fan, a typically small woman's object, heroic by painting it six feet by twelve feet. "The fan-shaped canvas, a powerful icon, gave Schapiro the opportunity to experiment … Out of this emerged a surface of textured coloristic complexity and opulence that formed the basis of her new personal style. The kimono, fans, houses, and hearts were the form into which she repeatedly poured her feelings and desires, her anxieties, and hopes".
Cecilia Roser, who works under the name Ce Roser, was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1925. Roser has been active in New York City as an artist since the 1960s. Ever since childhood, Roser had been painting and drawing. While studying in Berlin, Roser learned of a female artist named Käthe Kollwitz. Kollwitz, who worked until the day she died, was an inspiration to Roser. Remarking that she would like to live that way too, Roser proceeded to emphasize the need for young artists, especially women, to find a fitting predecessor and mentor.
The feminist art movement refers to the efforts and accomplishments of feminists internationally to produce art that reflects women's lives and experiences, as well as to change the foundation for the production and perception of contemporary art. It also seeks to bring more visibility to women within art history and art practice. The movement challenges the traditional hierarchy of arts over crafts, which views hard sculpture and painting as superior to the narrowly perceived 'women's work' of arts and crafts such as weaving, sewing, quilting and ceramics. Women artists have overturned the traditional view by, for example, using unconventional materials in soft sculptures, new techniques such as stuffing, hanging and draping, and for new purposes such as telling stories of their own life experiences. The objectives of the feminist art movement are thus to deconstruct the traditional hierarchies, represent women more fairly and to give more meaning to art. It helps construct a role for those who wish to challenge the mainstream narrative of the art world. Corresponding with general developments within feminism, and often including such self-organizing tactics as the consciousness-raising group, the movement began in the 1960s and flourished throughout the 1970s as an outgrowth of the so-called second wave of feminism. It has been called "the most influential international movement of any during the postwar period."
Feminist art criticism emerged in the 1970s from the wider feminist movement as the critical examination of both visual representations of women in art and art produced by women. It continues to be a major field of art criticism.
Shirley Gorelick was an American figurative painter, printmaker, and sculptor. She "rejected both the extremes of nonobjectivity and photographic exactitude," choosing instead to use a range of sources that included photographs, live models, and her own sculpted life studies.
Carla Stellweg, born in the Dutch East Indies where she lived as well as in the Netherlands, Mexico and New York. Stellweg began her career in 1965 working as an assistant curator to Fernando Gamboa, the renowned museum builder who organized a plethora of international exhibitions on Mexico, its art and culture around the world. Stellweg is an art historian, curator, and writer with a specialization on Latin American and Latino-US art and artists. She served as Deputy Director of the Rufino Tamayo Museum at its opening and prior to the Tamayo Museum, she co-founded, edited and directed the first bilingual (Spanish-English) arts magazine in Latin America from 1973-1981.
The first international exhibition of art by female artists opened on December 21, 1976 at a time when the Feminist Art Movement was gaining in support and momentum. The show was curated by Professors Ann Sutherland Harris and Linda Nochlin and included eighty-three artists from twelve countries. The four-city exhibition was organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and was on view there from December 21, 1976 through March 1977. The exhibition went on to show at the University Art Museum in Austin, Texas and then to the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, after which it completed its run at the Brooklyn Museum in New York. The Alcoa Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts provided grants for the exhibition. The show became an important event in the history of art, introducing viewers, who were accustomed to a history of art dominated by men, to the important contributions of women artists. However, the show consisted almost entirely of white female artists. The show only included one artist of color, Frida Kahlo, and no black artists.
PESTS was an anonymous American activist group formed in 1986 to critique racism, tokenism, and exclusion in the art world. PESTS produced newsletters, posters, and other print material highlighting examples of discrimination in gallery representation and museum exhibitions. PESTS also publicized events and exhibits featuring artists, scholars, and curators of color.
Robin Tewes is a Queens-born, New York City-based artist, known since the early 1980s for her representational paintings of frozen, narrative-like moments. She has shown her work in numerous solo exhibitions in New York City, as well as nationally and internationally, and exhibited at venues including P.S. 1, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, The Drawing Center, and the Central Academy of Fine Arts (Beijing), among many. Her work has been widely discussed in publications including Artforum, Art in America, ARTnews, Tema Celeste, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Village Voice. Tewes was a founding member of the P.S. 122 Painting Association. She has been recognized with a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Fellowship (2015) and Painting Award (2008), an Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation Award (2007), and inclusion in the Smithsonian Archives of American Art in 2016.
Frances Borzello is a British art historian and scholar, feminist art critic and author. Her work specializes in the social history of art, and includes study on the social position of European woman artists in the context of their society, the study of female self-portraits and female nudes. She authored the book Seeing Ourselves: Women's Self Portraits, which has been continuously published since 1998 and has 30 editions. Her work widely recognized as contribution to the fields of art history and women's studies.
Jane Kaufman was an American artist who was affiliated with the Pattern and Decoration movement. She was also a member of the art group Guerrilla Girls.
The Untitled Space gallery is an art gallery in the Tribeca neighborhood of New York City founded by curator, photographer, magazine editor, and multidisciplinary artist Indira Cesarine in 2015. It exhibits the work of contemporary artists working in media including painting, sculpture, photography, video, printmaking, mixed media, and performance art.
{{cite book}}
: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)