In 1985, a group of anonymous women artists came together under the moniker the Guerrilla Girls, taking the art world to task for its abominable representation—or rather, the lack thereof—of women artists, Black artists, and other minority groups. Their bold posters laid bare the systemic inequities of the art world with sharp humor, backed up by well-researched statistics. That was 40 years ago.
“It’s really hard to believe. We literally had the idea to put a couple of posters up on the streets of New York, and all hell broke loose,” founding Guerrilla Girl Käthe Kollwitz told me. (The members all go by the names of deceased women artists.)
The collective’s long history of holding the art world accountable and exposing its discrimination in race, gender, and class is being rightly celebrated in this anniversary year. A major New York moment includes not one but two gallery shows, at Hannah Traore Gallery (which closed over the weekend) and Mary Ryan Gallery. And later this month, the National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA) in Washington, D.C., the world’s first museum dedicated exclusively to women artists, is staging a major solo show of its Guerrilla Girl holdings. (There’s also a show right now at the National Gallery in Sofia, Bulgaria.)
“With the fact that it is the Guerrilla Girls’ 40th anniversary, it felt like the right moment to revisit and be re-inspired and reinvigorated by their work,” NMWA associate curator Hannah Shambroom told me. “They lay out these issues that were an undercurrent in the art world. In art history courses, the under representation of women and artists of color is something that’s not present, because their actual presence is missing—but it’s noticeable throughout. The Guerrilla Girls make that absence very obvious.”
The opening reception for “Discrimi-NATION: Guerrilla Girls on Bias, Money, and Art” at Hannah Traore Gallery, New York. Photo by Deonté Lee, courtesy of BFA.
The collective is receiving an award at the institution’s upcoming gala, and has mounted a campaign to encourage museum donors to help NMWA acquire the entirety of the “Portfolio Compleat,” of every work the Guerrilla Girls have ever made. (The current holdings are missing about 75 works from the portfolio, which comprises 134 posters, nine videos, two newsletters, and six books.)
“As the preeminent museum of women artists in the United States, NMWA should have the complete record of the Guerrilla Girls’ work,” Frida Kahlo, another founding member, told me.
Guerrilla Girls, (2024). Collection of the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Museum, Washington, D.C., purchase: Members’ Acquisition Fund.
The show includes work ranging from 1985 to the present day, ending with the 2024 work . That acquisition included the physical poster as well as a high-resolution digital file that institutions are able to reproduce for exhibition purposes. An enlargement on vinyl will be adhered directly to the wall. (That’s the same way the posters were shown at Hannah Traore, where was also the centerpiece.)
The work is a list of challenges to museums, such as to “REPATRIATE pillaged, smuggled, and looted artifacts in your collection” and “HONOR your employees, never undermine their efforts to unionize, and pay them a living wage with benefits.”
In the decades since their founding, the collective, its members clad in their signature, identity-obscuring gorilla masks, has become a powerful force for art world activism in the fight for inclusivity, their message resonating with generations of women.
Guerrilla Girls, (1989). Courtesy of Hannah Traore Gallery, New York.
That includes both dealers staging Guerrilla Girls shows: Mary Ryan, who was just 24 when she started her namesake gallery as a means championing women artists back in 1981, and Hannah Traore, now 30, who founded her eponymous gallery, which specializes in artists from under-represented backgrounds, in 2022.
“I have to pinch myself sometimes. I just cannot believe that I’m working with my heroes,” Traore, who first learned about the Guerrilla Girls in art history class, told me.
One of the Guerrilla Girls with art dealer Hannah Traore at the opening reception for their exhibition. Photo by Deonté Lee, courtesy of BFA.
Ryan, on the other hand, encountered the group in the wild back in the 1980s, their posters wheatpasted on the streets of Soho, where she lived.
“I felt this sense of pride when I saw these posters go up,” Ryan said. “They really were plastered all around, on construction sites and on building facades, even telephone poles. You won’t remember this, but we had phone booths!” (For the record, I do remember phone booths.)
The very first Guerrilla Girls posters were inspired by “An International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture,” a blockbuster group show at New York’s Museum of Modern Art that only included 13 women in its 165 artists. And if those numbers weren’t bad enough on their own, the curator, Kynaston McShine, proclaimed at the time that “any artist who wasn’t in the show should rethink his career.”
“Everyone thought that whatever was in the museums was the best. And if you weren’t in the museums, you were a bad artist,” Kollwitz recalled. “We came up with a new kind of political posters that used the persuasive strategies of advertising to try to change people’s minds.”
In the beginning, the Guerrilla Girls eviscerated the art world status quo using black-and-white posters with crisp typography that used simple numbers to illustrate the truth of how galleries and institutions were excluding women and artists of color.
Installation view of “Discrimi-NATION: Guerrilla Girls on Bias, Money, and Art” at Hannah Traore Gallery, New York. Photo by Deonté Lee, courtesy of BFA.
“The mission of the group is a real desire for museums and galleries, collectors and institutions to do better,” Shambroom said. “It’s not just about scolding or calling out, but to actually implement and inspire change.”
Though the Guerrilla Girls made waves by critiquing the institutional art world on the streets of New York, museums, especially at universities soon began to exhibit and collect their work. Today, their posters can be found at leading institutions such as the Art Institute of Chicago, the Tate Gallery in London, and even the MoMA.
“There’s this interesting tension between the guerrilla tactics that they’re originally using to call out museums, and then being collected by those very same institutions,” Shambroom said.
The opening reception for “Discrimi-NATION: Guerrilla Girls on Bias, Money, and Art” at Hannah Traore Gallery, New York. Photo by Deonté Lee, courtesy of BFA.
The commercial gallery world—another recurring Guerrilla Girls target, as so many dealers have historically primarily represented and exhibited white men—has proved harder to infiltrate. Not only was the work taking direct aim at dealers and their wealthy collectors. But each piece was just a poster, made for the streets and not in any sort of limited edition. Not exactly market catnip.
“Galleries can’t make the kind of money they can make on another kind of show,” Kollwitz said. (The collective’s auction record, set in 2022, is just $12,600, according to the Artnet Price Database.)
But Traore doesn’t limit herself to the traditional gallery model. The work on display in the galleries, printed to the Guerrilla Girls’ specifications for the occasion, wasn’t even for sale. Instead, there was merchandise starting at $20, a set of five Kahlo-signed posters for $5,000, or the chance to buy the “Portfolio Compleat” for $40,000. (Traore told me the portfolio is usually available only to institutions, and that the only private collector who owns one is Roxanne Gay.)
Guerrilla Girls, , “Guerrilla Girls Talk Back: The First Five Years, 1985–1990” (1990). Collection of the National Museum of Women in the Arts; gift of Steven Scott, Baltimore, in honor of Wilhelmina Cole Holladay.
The dealer was inspired to reach out to the Guerrilla Girls after attending the 2023 premiere for the collective’s episode of the Art21 series .
“I actually just went on their website and they had an e-mail right there. They got back to me pretty quickly!” Traore said. “And then I met Frida Kahlo, and we just got along so well. I think she realized how kindred we were. It just became a really beautiful collaboration and and friendship.”
“Hannah is taking risks. She’s committed, so it was really the kind of place that we felt comfortable in,” Kahlo said.
A guest looks at the art at the opening reception for “Discrimi-NATION: Guerrilla Girls on Bias, Money, and Art” at Hannah Traore Gallery, New York. Photo by Deonté Lee, courtesy of BFA.
“What she does puts pressure on the other galleries—and she’s not the only one,” Kollwitz added.
Working with Traore was the first time the collective had ever been approached by a traditional art gallery. (Their first Los Angeles show, which opened in December, was with Beyond the Streets, street art historian Roger Gastman’s permanent space inspired by his blockbuster exhibition series of the same name.)
The exhibition at Mary Ryan Gallery, meanwhile, came as a surprise to the Guerrilla Girls when I spoke to them for this story. It features a selection of the group’s vintage posters from the collection of the late Emma Amos (1937–2020), who was a founding member of the collective. (The set sold to an undisclosed museum.)
A collection of vintage Guerrilla Girls posters from the late former member Emma Amos. Photo courtesy of Mary Ryan Gallery.
“Emma was a wonderful and beloved member of our group. It’s wonderful that she’s getting attention, but it came a little bit too late for her to understand and appreciate,” Kahlo said. “It goes back to our poster , ‘knowing your career might pick up after you’re 80.’”
The show, framed posters mounted on a vibrant yellow wall, coincides with sister gallery Ryan Lee‘s solo show for May Stevens, another deceased Guerrilla Girl. (The two galleries share a space, and Ryan Lee represents the estates of both Amos and Stevens.) Showcasing Amos’s personal collection of Guerrilla Girls posters at Mary Ryan, which specializes in Modern and contemporary prints and works on paper, was a way to celebrate the activism of both artists. (An estimated 60 women have been collective members over the years.)
“The idea was connecting May and Emma in that way—and also just looking at how spectacular the Guerrilla Girl posters are,” Ryan said. “They have a really strong graphic design element to them when you see them collectively, not just one at a time. Obviously the content, the messaging, the words are really powerful, but they’re just fantastic posters in their own right.”
Guerrilla Girls, , “Guerrilla Girls Talk Back: Portfolio 2” (2005). Collection of the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.; gift of Steven Scott, Baltimore, in honor of Wilhelmina Cole Holladay. ©Guerrilla Girls.
As technology improved and color printing became more affordable, the Guerrilla Girls’ posters became more elaborate, with more facts and figures and color imagery. The message has evolved too, taking on the influence of wealth and power in the art world more broadly. But it can be hard to tell how old a given Guerrilla Girls’ work is, because racism and sexism remain such persistent issues.
“It’s sad how relevant and contemporary many of these messages on the posters remain today,” Ryan said. “There are definitely more women represented in galleries and museums today, but it’s still not enough. And the pay disparity for art by male versus female artists is still enormous. There’s a lot of catching up that needs to be done.”
“We maybe talk about it a bit more now, but change is quite slow,” Traore agreed.
Guerrilla Girls, (1989). Courtesy of Hannah Traore Gallery, New York.
It’s telling, of course, that all three Guerrilla Girls are at museums or galleries that are dedicated at least in part to promoting the voices of women. (The collective is also prepping for a November show at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, which holds the Guerrilla Girls archive.)
“The National Museum of Women in the Arts was always criticized as being a ghetto for women’s art,” Kahlo said. “And we would always say, ‘well, until we don’t need it, we need it.’”
The collective is, of course, horrified by the actions of the new administration under President Donald Trump. His anti-DEI initiatives stand in direct opposition to everything the Guerrilla Girls have fought for during their careers, and stand to have a devastating effect for women and LGBTQ artists, and artists of color.
Guerrilla Girls, (2007). Collection of the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.; gift of Susan Fisher Sterling in honor of Steven Scott. ©Guerrilla Girls.
“The challenge is going to be, is the art world—the power in the art world, not artists—going to cave into Trump the way, one by one, law firms and universities and of course the Republican Party have,” Kahlo said.
“[Racism and sexism] will get worse and worse with Trump trying to return museums—and the whole country for that matter—to their old discriminating ways,” Kollwitz added. “But what you can do is everything possible to make people aware of it, and that’s what we’ve always tried to do. And no matter what, we will keep going.”
Source: Exhibition - news.artnet.com
