E
C
I
N
E
K
A
M
O
T
Y
D
A
E
NOT R
eyond
B
and
d
l
or
W
art
e
In th
1
2
Contents
Foreword: Art and Occupation
2
by Jane M. Saks
Not Ready to Make Nice
4 by Neysa Page-Lieberman
The Feminist Roots of the Guerrilla
Girls’ “Creative Complaining”
23 By Joanna Gardner-Huggett
Guerrilla Girls, Graffiti, and Culture
Jamming in the Public Sphere
27 by Kymberly N. Pinder
31 Exhibition Checklist
32 Acknowledgments
Cover image taken from Benvenuti alla Biennale Femminista,
first shown at the 2005 Venice Biennale.
Foreword: Art and Occupation
by Jane M. Saks, Executive Director, Ellen Stone Belic Institute for
the Study of Women and Gender in the Arts and Media
There are times in which
immense social upheaval
and aesthetic innovation rise
simultaneously to influence
profound shifts in dominant
institutions and generate a
wide social constellation.
We can only hope that the present is one of those
times—a time in which a cultural and social seachange occurs; a virtual and actual wave of creative
experimentation and engagement shifts the social
geography. It has happened before.
Cultural production has an inherent ability to insert
the democratic practices of free speech and institutional
critique into spaces that actively or passively prohibit
them. Throughout history, in times of revolution,
movements have skillfully exploited and enlisted the
essential mix of art, politics, free speech, and action to
create and protect democratic spaces in spite of—and
directly on the turf of—powerful institutions.
In 2011, we began to witness people around
the world risk everything to occupy public space
-- demanding to be seen, heard and exercising their
agency to participate in the political and social arena.
Globally, this moment is particularly alarming for
its serious challenges, stark and growing historic
inequalities, severe and escalating risks, and its peculiar
similarities to other troubling times. It has also been
a period of extreme social and political shifts brought
about by undeniable and fierce activism. Since the
beginning of 2011, people across the globe and on
multiple continents have proved that individual action
can bring about collective social change. In this context,
4
collective cultural production focused on
direct action and communal participation
centralizes key questions: how is culture
accessed and how does that influence
collective cultural practices?
These are the challenges, questions,
and interests that first motivated us at
Columbia College Chicago to create a
year-long, campus-wide initiative with
the Guerrilla Girls, led by the Ellen Stone
Belic Institute for the Study of Women
and Gender in the Arts and Media and the
Department of Exhibition and Performance Spaces.
The idea of presenting the breadth of the Guerrilla
Girls’ practice at this moment is linked to the recent
and vibrant activism beginning in 2011, especially the
Occupy Movement and historic movements such as
the Arab Spring. These are direct democratic practices
that reclaim the right to inhabit and critique public
spaces. They enlist the oldest techniques of democratic
agency and locate them at the center of new media and
technology. The creation of culture, in its most concrete
applications, mirrors and reflects back sharp and often
invisible realities to the dominant and exclusionary
institutions that help produce them. Invisibility, visibility,
and power have been at the center of the Guerrilla Girls’
work for more than three decades.
A self-described group of radical feminist artists,
the Guerrilla Girls were established in New York City in
1985. They became known for using creative graphics,
actions, and exhibitions to promote women and people
of color in the arts. Their first work was putting up posters
anonymously on the streets of New York to illustrate the
gender and racial imbalance of artists represented in
galleries and museums. They were, simply or not, trying
to get museums to represent a larger, more diverse
vision of culture. They were investigating who makes
art, why, and how it gets constituted and experienced.
I remember walking down the city streets as an
undergraduate college student in 1980s New York when
I first saw a Guerrilla Girls’ poster layered across a SoHo
wall. The information was at once exhilarating—publicly
naming the inequality we all knew was true—and, at the
same time, exposing that the facts and attitudes were
even worse than we thought.
The 1980s was another time when institutions
shifted and coalesced, putting elements into motion that
continue to this day to shape our lives: Reagonomics
(justified greed at a new and extreme level and the
dismantling of social support systems), the early years
of the AIDS epidemic (immoral policies and cruel
declarations that said it was somehow a justified plague),
the growing LGBT rights movement, the increasing
global awareness of the anti-apartheid movement, the
continued struggles for racial and gender equity, and
more. Through this, the Guerrilla Girls encouraged people
to fight and laugh at the same time. They have since
expanded their activism to examine Hollywood and the
film industry, popular culture, gender stereotyping, and
corruption in the art world.
The Guerrilla Girls have worked in forty-eight states
and countless countries. Their books are popular among
political activists, scholars, and art historians, and have
become central curriculum in art history, women’s and
gender studies, cultural studies, and political science.
The Guerrilla Girls inspire other artists to enlist an
activist practice authentic to the times and collective
struggles. Their model of institutional critique and
subversion has prompted diverse cultural responses
from artists who now work to present and represent
different multi-generational, global perspectives focused
on issues of invisibility and visibility. Both building on and
diverging from the Guerrilla Girls’ critique of patriarchal
subordination of women, a vast range of new work has
emerged with deep feminist implications that differ in
form, content, and medium, but remain indisputable in
presence and unstoppable in necessity.
Not Ready to Make Nice includes essays by the
exhibit curator, Neysa Page-Lieberman, and scholars
Joanna Gardner-Huggett and Kymberly Pinder, each
of whom articulate a range of perspectives and
contextualize the work of the Guerrilla Girls. The
catalogue also includes the work shown in the exhibition,
bringing together new and significant pieces and projects
supporting the breadth of their multi-decade vision.
The Guerrilla Girls continue to exist and work on a
particular edge. Their work illustrates a belief that culture
and cultural institutions should represent the whole
of a society. Their relentless efforts combine artistic
expression and humor with irrefutable information to
disarm the powers that be—forcing them to examine
themselves and inviting each of us to do the same.
Museums Unfair to Men/Museums
Cave In To Radical Feminists, 2008
Not Ready
to Make Nice
by Neysa Page-Lieberman, Curator and
Director of the Department of Exhibition and
Performance Spaces
The Guerrilla Girls have been
powerfully and consistently active
since first breaking onto the art
scene in 1985. The feminist activist
group, who only appear in gorilla
masks, has remained anonymous for
nearly three decades, earning the
name, “the masked avengers.”
Beginning with their courageous poster campaigns of
the 1980s and 90s and continuing with large-scale
international work of the present, they brilliantly take on
the art establishment in a way that has never been seen
before or since. Using “facts, humor and fake fur,” they
have exposed the discriminatory collecting and exhibiting
practices of the most feared dealers, curators, and
collectors in the artworld. Masking their real identities
and appropriating the names of dead women artists,
they continue to reveal shocking truths in a way that
marginalized groups cannot do without repercussion.
The exhibition Not Ready to Make Nice illuminates and
contextualizes the important past and ongoing work of
these highly original, provocative, and influential artists who
champion feminism and social change. The show sets itself
apart from past exhibitions of Guerrilla Girls work in two ways.
First, most of the work included has been made within the
past decade and has rarely, if ever, been seen in the United
States. As the Guerrilla Girls’ early campaign moved outside
of New York, around the country, and finally abroad, they also
expanded their work to include non-visual arts media, taking
on everything from the discrimination of women film directors
to the vulnerability of America’s homeless population. The
second goal of the exhibition is to provide historical and
physical context for this work, especially considering that
none of the featured pieces in the exhibition were originally
designed to be shown in an art gallery. The earliest posters
were plastered on walls and fences in New York City’s SoHo
6
neighborhood (then the epicenter of the
art scene), and adhered quickly in the
middle of the night amidst rock posters
and advertisements. On the other
extreme, much of this work was designed
for large-scale banners and billboards,
to awe viewers with monumentality
and provocative messages. To capture
the context and appearance of each
piece, projected images of the work in
original settings and behind-the-scenes
anecdotes in the Guerrilla Girls’ own
words fill the gallery. The exhibition’s
focus on this contemporary work was a
vital part of the collaborative process between the curator,
college partners, and the artists. As described in Jane Saks’
illuminating foreword, significant current events, which
provide societal and cultural parallels to the statements in
the exhibition, truly punctuate the relevance of the Guerrilla
Girls’ current work. Not Ready to Make Nice, an expansive
multimedia exhibition, illustrates that the work of the
anonymous, feminist-activist Guerrilla Girls is as vital and
revolutionary as ever.
Early Work: Defining a Practice and Philosophy
A small selection of the Guerrilla Girls’ most iconic pieces
from the 80s and 90s sets the stage for their contemporary
work and provides a glimpse into the group’s formative
decisions that built their foundation. The Guerrilla Girls
were not the first collective of feminist artists to confront
the artworld’s discriminatory practices.1 However, they were
the first to attain real and sustaining attention from the
media. Early success may be explained by their intriguing
anonymity, the outrageousness of the gorilla masks, or
the fear in the art community that no one was safe from
a Guerrilla attack. But more likely, their quickly achieved
fame was due to their finely honed presentation style
characterized by succinct and quick-witted messages and
indisputable facts. Their incisive institutional critiques
revealed that the artworld did not exist in a vacuum and was
vulnerable to the same societal problems affecting everyday
life. The group explains, “Many people think the artworld is
above it all. They don’t think it’s subject to the same forces
as other areas of society.”2 The work challenged people’s
acceptance of the linear, patriarchal presentation in art
museums as the definitive story of art history.
These Artists, 1985 (Fig. 1) and These Galleries, 1985
(Fig. 2), were the posters that started it all. A press release
promised more to come and warned: “Simple facts will be
spelled out; obvious conclusions can be drawn.”3 These were
soon followed by their famous “report cards,” highlighting
horrifying statistics about the few, if any, women artists
and artists of color that were represented in New York’s
top galleries. Although many were aware of the inequity,
disseminating the embarrassing numbers shamed
dealers, collectors, and curators who soon came under
extreme pressure to make changes. Jane Saks recalls first
encountering the Guerrilla Girls’ work as an undergraduate
at Sarah Lawrence: “The first thing I felt was how smart and
bold it was that someone was just putting this information
out there. We all knew how inequitable the art world was
(mirroring our society as a whole) for any artist who was
not white, male, straight, had access and was part of the
power network. The Guerrilla Girls built an emotional and
intellectual response with quantifiable information. It was
a simple, concrete and unadulterated public declaration.
And, this at a time when the mainstream political forces
were clamping down on activism. It was in the midst of the
Reagan years, which sanctioned a focus on wealth and the
individual, the privileged and the powerful. At the same time,
and not coincidentally, there were so many remarkable things
happening in the creative and socially engaged realm.”4
Another early highlight was The Advantages of Being a
Woman Artist, 1988 (Fig. 3). The collective jokes: “The word
on the street was, ‘The Guerrilla Girls are so negative! All
they do is complain!,’ so we took this criticism to heart and
decided to do this poster to make women feel better about
their situation.’” While this was not literally a feel-good
poster, citing such “advantages” as “Having the opportunity
to choose between career and motherhood” and “Seeing
your ideas live on in the work of others,” it gave voice to the
secret frustrations of countless women. Works like these
drew in fan mail, and lots of hate mail: “We were always a
little afraid because we really thought that we were dealing
with dangerous stuff and if it were discovered who we were,
it would be the end of our art careers.”5 But the group was
astounded to get letters from women in fields as diverse as
meteorology to mortuary science, saying that the Guerrilla
Girls work defined their worlds, too.
Upping the ante like never before, a smash hit came
when the group released one of their most famous works
of all time, Do Women Have to be Naked to Get Into the Met.
Museum, 1989 (Fig. 4). This work, commissioned by the
Public Art Fund, was intended to be a billboard in Manhattan.
The challenge of a first-ever large-scale public work excited
the group and prompted them to invent the now-infamous
“wienie count.” The Guerrilla Girls went through New York’s
Metropolitan Museum of Art and simply counted male and
female artists versus male and female nudes in the artworks.
In the resulting work, the disheartening statistics were placed
next to an image of Ingres’ classic Grande Odalisque, masked
in the signature confrontational gorilla head. The PAF rejected
the design, possibly fearing taking on the Met in public, so the
group ran it themselves on rented space on the sides of city
buses. This very public action increased the Guerrilla Girls’
visibility and earned them a cult following; “It was immediately
reshown by us and our followers all over the place. . . . We
wanted to reach a wide audience, not just the art crowd. . .
and most people don’t know these issues.”6 The group has
updated “The Met” piece many times, but the statistics have
not improved—until 2011. While the percentage of women
artists on view has not changed, the percentage of nude
women has dropped and there are now more images of naked
men on view; the “wienie count” continues to grow.
Politics: The Artworld is Not Immune to its
Discriminatory Society
After the success of the early posters, the Guerrilla Girls
quickly widened their cause to include politics and broader
issues of exclusion. Works such as Battle of the Sexes, 1996,
which exposed harsh realities about the workplace, and
Pop Quiz, 1990, which asks, “Q: If February is Black History
Month and March is Women’s History Month, what happens
the rest of the year? A: Discrimination.,” reflected the group’s
insistence that the artworld will always be affected by larger
political and societal tensions.
The Guerrilla Girls have continued to confront war,
anti-women congressional decisions, racism, and tokenism
in many of their works: posters, newspaper spreads,
demonstrations, and more. Their recent work has become
even more bold and daring, with highly successful campaigns
and public works such as The Birth of Feminism Movie Poster,
2001 (Fig. 5), Estrogen Bomb, 2003 (Fig. 6), I’m Not a Feminist,
But. . . , 2009 (Fig. 7), and Disturbing the Peace / Troubler le
Repos, 2009 (Fig 8). These four works tackle issues such as
violence against women, misconceptions about feminism,
and the perpetuation of misogyny throughout history. Birth
of Feminism and I’m Not a Feminist, But. . . use humor and pop
culture references to address derogatory associations about
feminism and female empowerment. Both works use tonguein-cheek approaches to illustrate the trend of young women
rejecting the word feminist, while still embracing the tenets
and goals of the feminist movement. Misplaced negativity
and fear-driven associations with feminism also drive the
message behind Disturbing the Peace / Troubler le Repos, which
marks the twentieth anniversary of the worst mass murder in
Canadian history when a gunman sought to “fight feminism”
by murdering fourteen female engineering students.
The Guerrilla Girls graffitied a wall with misogynist hate
speech from world history, showing how it has always been
7
acceptable to make hateful public statements about women,
highlighting horrific quotes from Confucius to Picasso to
Eminem. Estrogen Bomb, first appearing in the Village Voice
in 2003, was the group’s sardonic, yet decidedly non-violent
solution to the war on terror. They proposed a destructionfree, hormone-filled weapon that led people to “throw down
their guns, hug each other, say it was all their fault,” and
solve other problems afflicting the world such as poverty and
absence of healthcare.
Going Global: It’s Worse. . . Everywhere
Sadly, the Guerrilla Girls never run out of issues to address
and, thus, work to make, always compelled to confront and
critique institutions and prejudices around the world. Much of
their new work takes the form of invitations and commissions;
even the Guerrilla Girls have been surprised by the demand
for their work. They have made no shortage of enemies,
humiliating powerful institutions, publicizing the names of the
supposedly untouchable, and distributing their work far and
wide.7 But their call to action has been telling—New York is
not unique in its regressive exhibition practices and in fact,
elsewhere may be even worse.
In 2007, the Guerrilla Girls were invited by the
Washington Post to critique the museums in Washington,
D.C. in a special section on feminism and art. They designed
a tabloid, Horror on the National Mall (Fig. 9), to reveal the
appalling statistics that floored even the staff working within
these institutions. The Girls recently reflected, “The Washington
Post project was so telling: here you have tax payer supported
institutions and exhibitions in a majority black city, but
still there are almost no black artists on the walls.” While
frustrating to see these problems persist, a marked difference
now is that “people are embarrassed when these issues are
pointed out. Before they would say that it was not possible
or justifiable to show more women or artists of color.”8 Many
individuals working on the inside knew of these problems but
felt powerless to resolve them—this work and the resulting
media attention gave them the ammunition to create change
from the ground up.
The 2005 Venice Biennale was called “the first feminist
biennale” by the Guerrilla Girls who were asked by Rosa
Martinez and Maria de Corral—the first women directors
of the Biennale in its 110 year history—to critique the
extremely influential international art fair. The result was
Benvenuti alla Biennale Femminista (Fig. 10), which then led to
a sweeping critique of Venice itself in Where are the Women
Artists of Venice? (Fig. 11). Research revealed that almost
every museum in Venice owns work by women, but almost
all of it is relegated to basement storage. Thus, the answer
to the question, “Where are the women artists” is, literally,
“underneath the men.” The poster is illustrated with an iconic
still from Federico Fellini’s film, La Dolce Vita, showing Marcello
Mastroianni mounting Anita Ekberg. Other works, such as Irish
Toast, 2009 (Fig. 12), and The Future for Turkish Women Artists,
8
2006 (Fig. 13), were similarly commissioned by institutions to
shed light on enduring and galling local statistics. Drawing
from traditional local customs and rituals, these works
contrast the two countries’ rich cultural inheritances with
their minimal support or representation of diverse voices.
While Ireland toasts, “May your academies be seminal,”
Turkish coffee grounds reveal grave predictions: “Curators
who forget women when they organize museum exhibitions
and biennials will be banished to the US and EU where such
backward ideas belong.”
With so many world museums currently readdressing
their collections, it is not surprising that the Guerrilla Girls
have turned the spotlight on Chicago, one of the world’s most
metropolitan and multicultural cities, boasting some of the
largest collections of art and cultural objects. Some may think
Chicago’s major art institutions would rank better than other
cities, considering Chicago has a long and deep heritage of
supporting women artists and artists of color. The School of
the Art Institute, for example, was one of the first art schools
in the nation to admit black students; there are flourishing
cultural museums like the DuSable Museum for African
American History and the National Museum of Mexican Art;
numerous culture-shaping feminist art collectives (Artemesia
and Woman Made, for example) and many more institutions
whose mission it is to support diversity. However Chicago’s
museums demonstrate the same problems as those
documented in the Guerrilla Girls’ body of work.9 Chicago
Museums: Time for Gender Reassignment, 2011 (Fig. 14),
uses an image of the Art Institute’s iconic Beaux-Arts façade,
featuring a cornice carved with the names of white, male
historical figures, as a symbol of the predominance of similar
trends inside the buildings of Chicago. The Guerrilla Girls pose
as cherubic action heroes flying down from the heavens to
remedy the situation by installing a new frieze that includes
a more inclusive representation of art historical figures.
The decision to use cherubs is particularly witty as they are
genderless and thus better poised to fight bias. Gathering
statistics directly from institutional websites and from work on
view in the galleries in fall 2011, the Guerrilla Girls challenge
Chicago to tackle the lack of diverse voices in its leading
institutions, demanding that an accurate picture of history is
impossible when the voices of 70 percent of the population
are excluded.10
Hitting the Mainstream: Taking on Hollywood
Around the turn of the twenty-first century, the Guerrilla Girls
decided to address the proverbial 800-pound gorilla in the
room—Hollywood. Prompted by correspondence from female
film directors and an invitation from The Nation, who wanted
to feature a project about women in film, The Anatomically
Correct Oscar, 2002 (Fig. 15), was born. This work had its
biggest impact at the Academy Awards where it was shown on
a billboard just blocks away from the event. “We redesigned
the Golden Boy to more closely resemble the guys who
take him home each year. . . . He’s white and male, just like
the guys who win.” The group considers Hollywood to be
“an irresistible target of hypocrisy,” in which Hollywood’s
professed liberal values are at odds with its inequality of
employment opportunities for women and people of color.11
The internationally popular follow-up work, Unchain the Women
Directors, 2006, was first shown as a billboard in Hollywood
and soon translated into other languages. It features King
Kong bellowing bad news for women in film. The Spanish
language version (Fig. 16) debuted in Mexico City on the side
of an artist-in-residence building.
The Guerrilla Girls are planning more projects
addressing the entertainment industry, not only because
of the encouragement and partnership of activists working
in film, but because the “Hollywood stuff gets a huge bang
for the buck because there’s so much press set up to cover
Hollywood. Much more than in the artworld. . . . It’s a new
story for them. . . there’s this huge interest.”12
Future: Where to Now
After almost three decades of fighting the establishment, the
Guerrilla Girls find themselves in the paradoxical position
of being featured in exhibitions and performances at the
very institutions they have, and continue to, critique. They
receive invitations from institutions wanting their museum or
geographical location assessed by the group. The Guerrilla
Girls have critically considered how their work might be
compromised by such requests, but ultimately decided to
accept the invitations, as is seen in the Washington D.C. work,
Project Ireland, and elsewhere. Whereas at one point, their
work could only be executed from the outside, they can now
execute the same goals from within, where all parties are
involved for the same reason: to rectify inadequate collecting
and exhibiting practices. Occasionally museums invite the
Guerrilla Girls to assess their own collections and yet remain
incredulous of the staggeringly poor results. Nonetheless,
this collaborative exercise can lead to real systematic change
where it becomes increasingly important for the success of
these institutions to address internal challenges.
In addition to partnering with art institutions, the
Guerrilla Girls have dedicated a large portion of their time
to working with college and university students. While
still at the height of their fame, they feel a need to ensure
their legacy and that of the feminist collectives that came
before them. Working with the next generation of activists
is central to fulfilling this mission. They have embraced the
information age, making their work available for download and
distribution on their website, and teaching their techniques
to students all over the world. In 2008, they teamed up with
the Brainstormers, a collective that came of age watching the
Guerrilla Girls wreak havoc on the artworld. The Brainstormers
employ some of the classic techniques of the Guerrilla
Girls—compiling screenshots of contemporary art galleries’
male-centric artist rosters and incorporating a punchy and
flamboyant sense of humor in their work—but they have a
decidedly new media- and performance-based approach to
toppling ivory tower power structures. Together the two groups
developed an “all-inclusive” action called Get Mad: “A street
action for feminists and anti-feminists, everyone welcome!”
While feminists completed mad-lib style postcards addressed
to the most discriminatory art galleries in New York City, antifeminists were welcomed into a fake protest group called
MAN (Male Art Now) (Fig. 17), in which they complained about
recent feminist art exhibitions that included zero percent men,
accusing museums of caving to radical feminists.
The Guerrilla Girls’ work with students in Chicago alone
speaks to the importance they place on mentorship and
collaboration with the next generation of arts and culture
workers. In 2010, they were invited by the School of the Art
Institute of Chicago to deliver the commencement speech.
While never shying away from an opportunity to critique an
institution from within its very own walls, the group took
digs at the school’s parent institution, the Museum of the
Art Institute, while simultaneously advising the audience to
“love museums, but be tough on them. . . demand ethical
standards. . . and make sure your favorite museum collects
the whole story of our culture.”13 Most recently, in the fall of
2011, they spent a week at Columbia College working with
hundreds of students in numerous workshops, listening to
students articulate their own challenges and frustrations as
they prepare to enter the professional world. The Guerrilla
Girls encouraged students to work towards collaboration, to
work against competition, and to embrace their frustration
and anger and become “creative, professional complainers.”
The group effortlessly galvanized students, faculty, and staff to
organize their own campaigns, and to fear nothing.14
Through their increasingly expansive work, lectures and
workshops, the Guerrilla Girls have succeeded in changing
the worldviews of countless individuals. Many have had their
eyes forced open to acknowledge that most of the artists
they have studied or promoted are part of a white, Western,
patriarchal canon. And many can no longer view any work
of art—be it an exhibition, film, performance, or even a
television show—without noticing, and often protesting,
the all too common lack of women and people of color. This
shift in the cultural psyche has occurred in institution-byinstitution, even individual-by-individual, and from that there
is no turning back.
I would like to thank the Guerrilla Girls, Stuart Carden, and
Brandy Savarese for their contributions to this essay. I also extend
my gratitude to: Jane Saks, Sara Slawnik, and Kipa Davis for their
partnership and unyielding vision in producing this program; Mark
Porter, Jennifer Murray, and Julianna Cuevas for lending their talent
and dedication to developing the exhibition; Joanna Gardner-Huggett
and Kymberly Pinder for their thought-provoking essays; and Ben
Bilow for his inventive design work. Together this group has brilliantly
captured the spirit and energy of the Guerrilla Girls body of work,
while adding a riveting and significant chapter to their history.
9
Fig. 2: These Galleries, 1985
Fig. 1: These Artists, 1985
2. The Advantages of Being a Woman Artist, 1988
1. These Artists and These Galleries, 1985
10
Fig. 3: The Advantages of Being a Woman Artist, 1988
Fig. 4: Do Women Have to be Naked to Get Into the
Met. Museum?, 1989 -2012
11
Fig. 5: The Birth of Feminism Movie Poster,
Rotterdam, 2007
12
Fig. 6: Estrogen Bomb, 2003–2012
14
Fig. 7: I’m Not a Feminist, But. . . ,
Belfast, 2009
Fig. 8: Disturbing the Peace / Troubler le Repos, 2009 –2012
15
16
Fig. 9: Horror on the National Mall, 2007–2012
17
Fig. 10: Benvenuti alla Biennale Femminista, 2005–2012
18
Fig. 11: Where are the Women Artists of Venice?, 2005–2012
Fig. 12: Irish Toast, 2009–2012
Fig. 13: The Future for Turkish Women Artists, 2006–2012
20
Fig. 14: Chicago Museums: Time for Gender Reassignment, 2012
21
22
Fig. 15: The Anatomically Correct Oscar Billboard, Los Angeles 2002–2012
Fig. 16: Unchain the Women Directors / Hay Que Quitar Las
Cadenas a Las Mujeres Directores,
Mexico City, 2006–2012
Fig. 17: M
useums Unfair to Men/Museums Cave In To
Radical Feminists, New York City, 2008
24
The Feminist Roots of
the Guerrilla Girls’
“Creative Complaining”
By Joanna Gardner-Huggett, Ph.D., DePaul University
Emerging as feminist activists at a
critical moment in the 1980s, the
Guerrilla Girls faced the reality that
the significant women’s political
gains of the previous decade were
under threat.
The failure of the Equal Rights Amendment, challenges to
reproductive rights, and Nancy Reagan polishing silver in the
White House became the emblems of womanhood.1 Women
in the artworld fared no better. Male artists, such as Eric
Fischl, David Salle, and Jeff Koons, were celebrated for their
images of objectified women and rewarded with instant fame
and record-breaking sales.2 Simultaneously, the Guerrilla
Girls joined a large field of women artists, including Barbara
Kruger, Jenny Holzer, and Ilona Granet, who countered
the misogyny of the commercial art market through the
appropriation of advertising and media. Disseminating their
subversive messages through stickers, posters, street signs,
and t-shirts, these artists staged public interventions in
SoHo, New York City’s thriving art district. But the Guerrilla
Girls offered something new by working collectively and
embracing anonymity. Donning gorilla masks, appropriating
the names of dead female artists, and embracing the
absurd and satire, the Guerrilla Girls disrupted the old order
and established new voices of authority that demanded a
visibility for women artists and artists and color.
The early history of the Guerrilla Girls is well known,
but what is not fully explored in art historical scholarship is
how the group builds on numerous tactics established by
feminist art activists in the 1970s. Until recently critics and
historians created a strict divide between the essentialism
of the 1970s versus the postmodernist
discourse of the 1980s where
language replaced the female body
as the site of political debate, forging
a “permanent rupture” and negating
any links between practitioners in
this period with their predecessors.3
Although the Guerrilla Girls do not cite
specific collectives or feminist artists
as models for their own work, situating
their practice—what they call “creative
complaining”—within the larger
chronology of feminist collaboration is a way to amplify
their innovations and their ability to maintain status as the
“conscience of the artworld” for more than twenty-five years.
As a collective, the Guerrilla Girls operate on the
consensus-model employed by women artists’ cooperatives
since the early 1970s as a way to reject patriarchal modes of
administration.4 Working in New York there were numerous
examples to emulate, such as A.I.R. Gallery formed in
1972 and SoHo 20 opened a year later.5 However, an even
stronger parallel can be drawn between the Guerrilla Girls
and the Heresies Collective, which was founded in November
1975 as a journal to address the intersection between
feminism, art, and politics. It resisted other journals’
dedication to monographic studies of women artists and
instead explored a particular theme in each issue, for
example, violence, lesbian women artists, and third-world
women. Each issue was developed by a smaller “collective”
within the larger membership, as well as a selection of
outside contributors who held expertise on that particular
subject.6 Utilizing similar strategies as the Heresies in
developing their campaigns, the Guerrilla Girls commit to a
specific topic, generate ideas, refine them, and realize the
project. In order to ensure an image or text is communicating
effectively, they test it on people who have not been immersed
in creating the issue for an extended period.7 Rather than
25
produce a publication that targets a specific population
already dedicated or at least interested in feminism, the
Guerrilla Girls’ posters, stickers, and actions turn to the street
and particular institutions responsible for discrimination. The
poster Guerrilla Girls’ 1986 Report Card (1986), for example,
lists powerful art dealers in SoHo and documents how many
solo shows each gave to women (over two seasons) with most
receiving a failing grade. The use of “plain-spoken” language
and signature graphics forces the art community to confront
and become accountable for questions too easily dismissed
in private.8 The impact of these posters was felt immediately.
New York dealer Patricia Hamilton remarked in 1987, “. . . it’s
getting to the point where you can’t not show women. You look
like a jerk.”9
Feminist art activists have long relied on tallying
discrimination against women, which is central to the
Guerrilla Girls’ success. For instance, they simply walked
through the galleries of the Metropolitan Museum of Art
and counted the number of “wienies” and female nudes
on view for their now iconic poster Do women have to be
naked to get into the Met. Museum? (1989). Sometimes
the group acquires statistics through the assistance of a
mole as in 1987 when a “deep throat” in the development
office of the Whitney smuggled out confidential data and
information about the museum’s trustees. Their research
and information culled from museum bulletins formed the
basis of the Guerrilla Girls’ Clocktower exhibition held the
same year and examined the visibility of women in the
Whitney Biennial, which is considered to be the preeminent
venue for contemporary artists working in the United
States.10 It included an installation “Can you score better
than the Whitney Curators?,” inviting visitors to throw darts
at a large mammary gland in an effort to draw attention to
achieving better gender and racial parity in the museum’s
biennial exhibitions. Their accompanying “Banana Report”
not only exposed the sexism and racism long part of the
museum’s biennial, but also trustees’ roles in companies
that manufacture products, such as cosmetics and
cigarettes, marketed to women and people of color who are
then denied representation in the exhibitions funded by the
profits.11 These statistics demonstrated that the state of
affairs had not improved since the group Ad Hoc Women’s
Art Committee protested the Whitney in 1970. Formed in
order to apply pressure to New York museums that ignored
women artists’ production, Ad Hoc Women picketed the
Whitney Sculpture Annual that year, demanding 50 percent
women and 50 percent artists of color. As a result of this
pressure, the percentage of women shown increased from
an average of 5-10 to 22 percent in 1971.12 However, the
Guerrilla Girls revealed that once the pressure eases so
does the commitment to diversity. The Whitney clearly still
feels the sting of both events, highlighting documentation
of both actions in a small exhibition organized by the
education department in honor of the 2010 Biennial, in
26
which they took the opportunity to announce that, for the
first time, more women than men were featured, twenty-nine
female artists versus twenty-six male artists. Of course,
the organizers were quick to qualify that the curators “did
not choose the artists specifically on the basis of gender
and race,” suggesting that they made selections based
on “quality”—a long held institutional defense against
accusations of discrimination.13 Further, the small exhibit
intimates that the question of gender equality is now part of
the historical past despite taking forty years to achieve such
parity. It will be interesting to see whether the 2010 Biennial
will become an “exception” to the Whitney’s history or if
another “Banana Report” is in the cards.
When the Guerrilla Girls formed in 1985, they were
reacting to what they perceived as ineffective methods of
protest among feminist activists in the arts. Walking a picket
line simply did not provoke any reaction or results and merely
affirmed the myth that feminists were dull and too serious.14
Instead, the Guerrilla Girls, as their name and actions imply,
employ guerrilla tactics, raucous humor, and spectacle as a
means to connect with an audience, and to prompt political
transformation. Take, for example, the panels “Hidden
Agender: An Evening with Critics” and “Passing the Bucks:
An Evening with Art Dealers” held at Cooper Union in May
1986. At both events major figures from the artworld, such
as the critics Grace Glueck, Carter Ratcliff, and Stephen
Westfall, and the dealers Ronald Feldman, Tony Shafrazi,
and Holly Solomon, were invited to discuss why women
artists were not visible in the artworld. The journalist Carrie
Rickey moderated both evenings, which meant that Guerrilla
Girls were free to play with the audience. Standing on either
side of the stage while each panelist spoke they held up a
sign reading “Oh Really,” and then turned it over to show
“But, I’m not angry,” any time self-serving statements were
frequently made.15 Gallerist Holly Solomon, for instance,
advised women “to use their natural attributes to get ahead
. . . like their breasts.”16 Here the Guerrilla Girls invoke the
efforts of feminist predecessors from the late 1960s and
early 1970s, such as the Women’s International Conspiracy
from Hell’s (WITCH) “zap actions,” including “Up Against Wall
Street” (Halloween, 1968) where women “hexed” banks and
brokerage firms, resulting in a 5-point stock market decline.17
Ad Hoc Women artists didn’t just picket the Whitney in 1970,
but also faked press announcements and tickets and strew
eggs and unused menstrual pads during a museum opening,
in addition to projecting images of women’s artwork on
the building’s exterior.18 Marcia Tucker explains that these
types of feminist actions engage in the carnivalesque, where
women “. . . curse, rant and rave and make fun of and mimic
whomever and whatever they want, themselves included,”
ultimately exposing the transgressions of those in power.19
More importantly, engendering laughter and the absurd
cements a bond with an audience that would rather be in on
the joke than be its subject, and offers a significant moment
Dearest Eli Broad, 2008
where ideological transformation can occur.20
In the 1970s, feminist activist art was viewed as a
means of mutual exchange between artists and audience,
which stimulated the development of numerous alternative
education programs for women artists. For example, in
1970 Judy Chicago established the Feminist Art Program at
Fresno State and Chicago, Sheila de Bretteville and Arlene
Raven founded the Feminist Studio Workshop in 1973
in Los Angeles.21 These student-driven programs armed
participants with feminist ideology, histories of women
and their representation, and tactics that could be used to
develop art and activist campaigns. Now that the Guerrilla
Girls have twenty-seven years of expertise under their
collective belt, they continue this tradition by sharing their
own experience in one-day activist workshops. In the two-day
Chicago workshop the Guerrilla Girls first poll participants
on their primary topic interests and then form groups of
those who wish to work on similar themes. Once the subject
is determined, images are developed and then critiqued
multiple times before the final project is executed. In Rio
de Janeiro, Brazil, young women developed a campaign on
body image where an archaeologist discovers the “ancient”
tradition of the Brazilian wax; in Kentucky, a workshop
addressed the abstinence pledge many teenagers are
asked to take. In October 2011, students in a papermaking
workshop at Columbia College Chicago paid homage to the
Guerrilla Girls by producing a series of posters on abaca
paper (made from the banana tree), which investigated
social and environmental conditions in Chicago, such as air
quality and high levels of autism.22 Although they only remain
in any specific community for a short time, the Guerrilla Girls’
emphasis on providing tools and expertise in the subversive
uses of information conveys skills that the participants
adopt for themselves, but may be shared with others. Such
methods of generating dialogue, debate, and action are
much more difficult to measure than the more immediate
impact of posters, but the Guerrilla Girls’ “small exchanges”
become global networks of resistance that are established
across communities over time.23
Building on a long history of feminist collaboration,
the Guerrilla Girls have created a unique and important
paradigm for activist art practice. Although their posters are
found in institutional collections, they are not represented
by any commercial gallery nor do they promote individual
women artists through curated exhibitions despite
numerous offers made to them to do so.24 This barrier
permits them to occupy a powerful space where they move
fluidly between margin and center, maintain pressure, and
motivate others to take up the cause for ending oppression
against women, all the while giving us a good laugh.
I am very grateful to the Guerrilla Girls, Frida Kahlo
and Kathe Kollwitz, for their generous responses to my
many questions.
27
Fig. 5: Posters on Montreal streets, 2009
Figs. 6, 7: Banners in Belfast, 2009
Fig. 8: Lady Pink, Brick Girl Crying, 2001, Acrylic on canvas
Figs. 1,2,3,4: Posters on New York streets, 1980’s
28
Guerrilla Girls, Graffiti,
and Culture Jamming in the
Public Sphere
by Kymberly N. Pinder,
Ph.D., School of the Art Institute of Chicago
In 1985 a small group of women artists in New York
formed the Guerrilla Girls in direct response to the
curator Kynaston McShine declaring that any artist
not in the exhibition “An International Survey of
Painting and Sculpture” at the Museum of Modern
Art should re-examine his career.
In most documentary photographs the Guerrilla Girls’ large
posters, including exhibition announcements, were the first
to obscure most of the existing street art on the walls (Fig.
1).3 Layers of gallery ads are discernible around and beneath
the Guerrilla posters with graffiti writer’s whips and letters
leaping out from behind them like colorful baroque frames.
The Guerrilla Girls were not only entering into an aggressive
dialogue with the artworld establishment, but also with the
street artists whose public forum they were appropriating.
The latter conversation was purely circumstantial: these
feminist activists were not disenfranchised youth struggling
against a bleak, post-industrial plight. They were majority
middle-class artists of varying ages trying to raise awareness
in the cheapest and most effective manner possible. In the
1980s, their protest posters utilized a space that contained
many political transgressors, outsiders, and “culture
jammers” all of whom were railing, in their own way, against
“The Man.” As graffiti scholar Ethel Seno writes, “It is vital
to understand how the uncommissioned intervention is a
reflex against the hegemony of public space by the interests
of the law over the psychological well-being of the many.”4
Like graffiti writers and punk posterers, the Guerrilla Girls
were also “claiming territories and inscribing their otherwise
contained identities on public property.”5 Within contested
public spaces these posters joined the fray within the visual
landscape of the Lower East Side.
More often than not the documentation for these
posters presents them as isolated graphic designs in a
textbook or article. In examining the few surviving images
of the early Guerrilla Girls posters in situ, the way they
would have been seen in the street engages the urban art
history of these posters (Figs. 2, 3). For example, to remain
in the visual conversation of a site already crowded with
posters, including those by the Guerrilla Girls, taggers like
THOR, BUSTER, SLIM, and a handful of stencilers moved
to the façade’s outer architectural posts that frame the
recessed wall of the building. The raised striations here were
unfriendly to wheatpasting so the taggers employed the
horizontal bands as marquees or banners for their names. A
large, heavily detailed stencil of a skeleton on top of SLIM’s
tag offers a visual pun worthy of Guerrilla wit. This framing
gave the taggers the odd position of both dominators and
caretakers of the art posters. The jockeying for space among
street artists, galleries, and feminist voices is a map of
SoHo’s gentrification in the mid-80s.
Ironically, legibility and identity have a curious
relationship in these SoHo photos. The taggers’ names are
obscured by their own “wild style,” and by the gallery posters
in which the names of the galleries and their exhibiting
(all male) artists are large and clear. The real names of the
Guerrilla Girls are not represented. This visual relationship
among names highlights the complex interplay between
subversion and anonymity that both the Guerrilla Girls and
street artists deploy in their urban interventions. In another
street image showing the Guerrilla Girls poster, On Oct. 17
The Palladium will apologize to women artists—both protest
29
signage and exhibition announcements—among layered
clutter makes the very small posters the most legible and
complete text on the wall. The only legible texts are two
looming tags: ROCK and CATCH.
In street art culture, there are strict codes concerning
when and why one artist may go over another’s work.
Gestures of dominance via tagging, postering, or painting
completely over a peer’s work could incite violence. How
a piece disappears is crucial. Graffiti blasters—city trucks
that power-wash graffiti off walls—are one thing, someone
else’s tag or poster is another matter entirely—it is a public
challenge. In a third documentary photograph, three Do
women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum? posters
remain intact and one poster has been ripped in half but
retains its text (Fig. 4). The tag MAX.K. in blue spray paint
obscures the Ingrés nude with gorilla mask. Lines of the
blue tag appear both under and over the paper fragments
recording the chronology of this set of defiant gestures. At
least four writers responded to these posters on their wall.6
As KANE explains, “As a location accumulates more tags by
more participants, it generates momentum and conversation
among the graffiti community. It becomes a goal to see
how many people can participate before it inevitably gets
erased. ‘How long can we live in this ephemeral moment
together?’ The Guerrilla Girls’ posters over these visual
conversations are equivalent to the police shutting down a
great party. Hegemony is restored.”7 On the contrary, the
Guerrilla Girls posters just joined the party. One has clearly
covered MAX.K’s tag, and he subsequently returned to tear
off the poster and restore some of it with another dose of
aerosol. The writer in red, the creator of the white paste-up
or small poster, and GAERY POSER also responded directly
onto the posters themselves. The latter tagger was clearly
taking advantage of a surface amenable to a Sharpie, while
one can only speculate why the red tagger “respected” the
Guerrilla poster and tagged beneath it, taking care not to
get too much of his/her serif onto its lower edge. In another
“installation shot” of these two posters, the dialogue is literal
in that someone responded to the question posed with “No,
they just have to make worthy art.” In a darker ink, “YO” was
written boldly on the nude’s buttocks.8 The poster attacked
sexism and sexists struck back.
As seen here, graffiti writers were also beginning to
poster or “flypost” in the 80s. Spray-can artists were turning
to alternative methods such as stickers and stencils. In their
book History of Graffiti, Roger Gastman and Caleb Neelon
explain “the poster was in effect . . . a simple, relatively
low-risk way to get up.”9 According to graffiti lore, in 1983
writers DJ NO and TESS of X-MEN created posters to combat
30
the advertisements that someone was specifically placing
over their tags: “The originals were done by hardcore, all-city,
ink-and paint-stained writers, DJ NO and TESS X-MEN—and
because of a beef!”10 Other writers, like the well-known
Shepard Fairey, have used posters to reach a larger and
more diverse audience. As KANE describes:
[T]heir aesthetic wasn’t exclusionary to the graffiti
community. It was sans-serif type that was meant to
be legible by the masses. Their campaign at the time
was equivalent to what a large marketing agency would
need 100s of people to execute nowadays. There’s also
an extra layer of subversion in the act, when it doesn’t
look like ‘graffiti’. . . . There’s a lot of privilege and
oppression that arises when using graffiti practices to
one’s own promotion, but simultaneously distinguishing
and separating the content that creates a cultural
distance from graffiti. A person wheat pasting a poster
may get as little as a ticket if caught by the authorities.
A person caught spray painting can potentially wind up
at Guantanamo Bay under the Patriot Act.11
Because the Guerrilla Girls postered in the arts district, their
activist moves jive very much with the street art of Keith
Haring or the clever, enigmatic, often indicting prose or
“speech acts” of Jean-Michel Basquiat and Barbara Kruger
circa 1982.12 All three artists strategically placed their street
interventions in SoHo, and in parts of Manhattan. Historians
and writers still argue whether Basquiat’s simple texts in
black spray paint, largely without any ornamentation or
imagery, had more affinities with advertising than graffiti.
The artist and his collaborators Al Diaz and Shannon Dawson
created the SAMO tag that sometimes addressed issues of
art-world inclusion and consumerism. Kollwitz remembers
seeing SAMO’s work at the time and finding it poetic as well
as sometimes opaque.13
In December 2009 the Guerrilla Girls re-entered the
conversation between fine art and street art by creating their
first facsimile of a gray brick wall covered in brightly colored
quotations scrawled in graffiti-like fonts entitled Disturbing
the Peace in Montreal that were large vinyl posters put up
around Montreal, Québec, to commemorate the twentieth
anniversary of a mass killing at l’École Polytechnique in
which a man who hated feminists shot and killed fourteen
female students (Fig. 5). The Guerrilla Girls wrote: “We
decided to focus on the history of hate speech against
women and feminists, from the Ancient Greeks to Rush
Limbaugh. We’re bothered that it has always been OK to
make denigrating public statements about women, and
shocked by the violence and abuse this language continues
to provoke.”14 For them, simulating graffiti represented
public and uncensored speech: “It seemed interesting to
have the quotes ‘scrawled’ on a wall, the way hate speech
often is. This poster is also one of the few the Guerrilla Girls
have done that has no headline.”15 In 2010 they brought
attention to the exclusionary practices of art schools and
museums in Ireland with an interactive installation entitled
Guerrilla Girls All Ireland Project at no. 76 John Street in
Kilkenny (Figs. 6 and 7). The artists installed a vinyl sheet of
a bright pink brick wall with handwritten and spray painted
phrases and statistics about the gender imbalance in
Ireland’s art schools and galleries. On the other side of the
gallery was a blank wall in which visitors were encouraged to
write their own responses. In other installations, the wall has
been a blackboard on which to write.16 With these posters
graffiti has become a trope functioning as both a subversive
brand and a vehicle for hate speech. As the earlier posters
obscured and sparred with actual tags, current posters
replicate the open forum of the street to criticize offensive
public discourse in another urban context. A quotation
about acknowledging misogyny below the frame of the fake
graffiti wall and the group’s web address are the de facto
didactic headline. The Guerrilla Girls’ brand functions as
synecdochically as the graffiti graphics. Inside the galleries,
visitors’ own writing on the walls mirrors actual taggers,
“talking back” and taking back ownership, albeit fleeting, of
a contested space.
And where do actual female graffiti writers enter into
this “found” dialogue between street art and feminist poster
“bombing”? While most writers do not make politicized work,
more women graffiti artists do than their male peers. Tags
like LADY PINK, DIVA and FEMME9 often reflect the goals
of “getting up” to represent skills equal to or better than
the men. LADY PINK or PINK, one of the first well-known
female writers who started tagging in the late 70s, helped
the Guerrilla Girls poster in SoHo. Her description of that
time sums up the dichotomy between the two worlds she
inhabited—the street and the gallery:
I wasn’t a Guerrilla but I knew them. . . . I volunteered to
hang an exhibit at The Clocktower and to go postering
for them at night since I had that kind of experience.
. . . The regular poster spots were hit but due to the
crowding of writers and posters downtown everyone
went over each other. The writers didn’t even notice
that the Guerrilla Girls existed. Only a small minority
of graff writers were involved in the “Art scene” and
we were mostly retired and not active. . . . These were
different worlds, the very well-bred artsy ladies and the
rough underground world of boys and subway vandals.
Their posters were considered a blank canvas to tag on.
I happen to be a cross-over, being female, artsy and a
vandal.17
The sexism PINK experienced as a writer raised the
feminist consciousness that drew her to the Guerrilla Girls:
“I went piecing deliberately with different groups so that
everyone could see I could actually paint this stuff and
not having some guy do it for me” (Fig. 8).18 Her constant
negotiations with obscuring and revealing her identity
parallel similar exercises in invisibility and power that the
Guerrilla Girls have deployed throughout their careers.
Using her real name masked her graffiti identity among
the “artsy ladies,” while she sought visibility among male
writers for street credibility. The collective name and gorilla
masks have also offered the Guerrilla Girls a freedom of
movement between multiple spheres.
Other female writers approached their minority status
as women differently. CLAW, another early writer who now
designs and sells CLAW clothing and jewelry, remarks
simply, “I was a feminist before I ever picked up a can of
paint—I painted because of THAT. . . . I didn’t attach a “Miss”
or “Lady” to my name, nor did I paint with tons of hearts
or girly flair. I wanted to bomb, so I did it just like anyone
else. Being a woman, of course feminine overtones would
shine thru [sic] once in a while.”19 A brief survey of websites
and blogs by young female artists and collectives results
in numerous citations of the Guerrilla Girls.20 The Guerrilla
Girls’ public lectures and their books geared towards lay
readers have enabled many young women artists today to
learn about these activists while growing up, as did graffiti
artist CHICAGOLOE: “I learned about the Guerrilla Girls in
my high school art history class; the only art class offered at
my high school. They are very impressive. They went about
their business by using a great strategy forcing the public
to acknowledge the fact that they were equal.”21 Street
artists and the Guerrilla Girls continue a legacy of subversion
in multiple spheres into the new millennium and the art
world is acknowledging their pivotal roles in art history as
culture-jammers, consciousness-raisers, and tastemakers.
In the summer of 2011 the Museum of Contemporary Art
in Los Angeles mounted a historic exhibition “Art in the
Streets” that drew record crowds, and in 2010 art by the
Guerrilla Girls was exhibited in the Whitney Biennial and in
the significantly titled exhibition “Contemporary Art from
the Collection” at the Museum of Modern Art in honor of the
Girls’ twenty-fifth year in business—or, as they would say, in
radical monkey business.
I would like to thank Käthe Kollwitz and Frida Kahlo for sending
me the installation documentation in this essay.
31
End notes
Not Ready to Make Nice
1.
Examples of past feminist activist groups can be
found in the recent documentary, !Women, Art, Revolution,
directed by Lynn Hershman Leeson, 2011, Hotwire
Productions.
2.
Phone conversation with the author, August 11,
2011.
3.
This excerpt is from a press release that was
mailed to a select group of people following the debut
of the first posters in May 1985. Email communication
between the author and the Guerrilla Girls, 12/27/11
4.
Conversation with Jane Saks, November 10,
2011.
5.
Oral history interview with Frida Kahlo and
Kathë Kollwitz (Archives of American Art, Smithsonian
Institution, 2008), 7)
6.
Phone conversation with the author, September
21, 2011.
7.
The exhibition Not Ready to Make Nice features an
installation of some of the most provocative love letters
and hate mail the Guerrilla Girls have received since
their formation. Some of these letters are so dear to the
collective that they have held onto them for decades for
encouragement and inspiration. As for the hate mail, the
collective often jokes that much of it is the unfortunate
result of the writer’s lack of a sense of humor.
Conversation with the author, October 19, 2011.
8.
For a thorough discussion of the key women’s
9
collectives/centers in Chicago, see Joanna GardnerHuggett, “Cultural Transformation through Collective
Participation in the Women Artists’ Cooperative:
Artemisia, ARC and Woman Made Galleries in Chicago,” in
Beyond Feminist Citizenship, ed. Sasha Roseneil (Palgrave
Press, 2012).
10. The Guerrilla Girls’ research for the Chicago piece,
both the data they collected from museum websites and
from what was on view in the museums themselves, was
conducted during multiple visits in October 2011.
11. Phone conversation with the author, September
21, 2011.
13. Oral history interview with Frida Kahlo and
Kathë Kollwitz, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian
Institution, 2008, 61.
14. The Guerrilla Girls delivered the SAIC
commencement speech in May 2010. The transcript can
be found at www.guerrillagirls.com/books/SAIC.shtml,
last accessed on December 15, 2011.
15. The group spent a week in October 2011 working
with Columbia College students in several different
disciplines. They openly shared their techniques in
creating effective campaigns, helped students identify
their own issues to tackle and demonstrated how activism
can be sustained over a long period of time.
The Feminist Roots of the Guerrilla Girls’ “Creative
Complaining”
Elizabeth Hess, “Guerrilla Girl Power: Why the Art
1.
World Needs a Conscience,” in But is it Art? The Spirit of Art
as Activism, ed. Nina Felshin (Seattle: Bay Press, 1995),
313.
Mira Schor, “Backlash and Appropriation,” in The
2.
Power of Feminist Art: The American Movement of the 1970s,
History and Impact, eds. Norma Broude and Mary D.
Garrard (NY: Harry N. Abrams, 1994), 249.
See Helen Molesworth, “House Work and Art
3.
Work,” October 92 (Spring 2000): 73.
Email correspondence with Frida Kahlo and Käthe
4.
Kollwitz, October 11, 2011. For a history of women artists’
cooperatives see Judith K. Brodsky, “Exhibitions, Galleries
and Alternative Spaces,” in The Power of Feminist Art,
104–119.
Anna C. Chave, “’The Guerrilla Girls’ Reckoning,”
5.
Art Journal 70 (Summer 2011): 106, n. 21.
32
Carrie Rickey, “Writing (Righting) Wrongs: Feminist
6.
Art Publication,” in The Power of Feminist Art, 126–127.
Email correspondence with Frida Kahlo and Käthe
7.
Kollwitz, October 11, 2011.
Chave, “‘The Guerrilla Girls’ Reckoning,”111.
8.
Patricia Hamilton quoted in Eleanor Heartney,
9.
“How Wide is the Gender Gap?,” ARTnews 86 (Summer
1987): 142.
10. Email correspondence with Frida Kahlo and Käthe
Kollwitz, October 11, 2011.
11. The Guerrilla Girls, Confessions of the Guerrilla Girls
(NY: Harper Perennial, 1995), 46–47.
12. Garrard, “Feminist Politics: Networks and
Organizations,” in The Power of Feminist Art, 90.
13. Sarah Meller, “The Biennial and Women Artists:
A look back at Feminist Protests at the Whitney,” May
3, 2010, accessible at http://whitney.org/Education/
EducationBlog/BiennialAndWomenArtists, last accessed
on December 4, 2011.
14. Oral history interview with Guerrilla Girls Frida
Kahlo and Käthe Kollwitz, Jan. 19–Mar. 9, 2008, Archives
of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
15. Josephine Withers, “The Guerrilla Girls,” Feminist
Studies 14 (Summer 1988): 287.
16. The Guerrilla Girls, Confessions of the Guerrilla
Girls, 42.
17. Garrard, “Feminist Politics,” 91.
18. Julia Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers Radical Practice
in the Vietnam War Era (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2009), 160.
19. Marcia Tucker, “Attack of the Mutant Ninja Barbies,” in
Bad Girls, exhibition catalogue (NY and Cambridge: New
Museum and MIT Press, 1994), 20.
20. Tucker, “Attack of the Mutant Ninja Barbies,” 20.
21. Tucker, “Attack of the Mutant Ninja Barbies,” 24.
22. See Laura Meyer, ed. A Studio of their Own: The
Legacy of the Fresno Feminist Experiment (Fresno: The
Press, California State University, 2009).
23. Phone conversation with the author, October 28,
2011. Regarding the Columbia College workshop, email
correspondence with Melissa Potter, November 4, 2011.
24. Phone conversation with the author, October 28,
2011.
25. In 1985 the Guerrilla Girls curated an exhibition of
approximately 100 women artists at the Palladium in New
York City. While they felt the event staged an important
intervention they decided never to curate a show of
women artists again. “We represent all women artists, not
a selection of them.” Oral history interview with Guerrilla
Girls Frida Kahlo and Käthe Kollwitz, Archives of American
Art, Smithsonian Institution.
Guerrilla Girls, Graffiti, and Culture Jamming in the
Public Sphere
Guerrilla Girls, Confessions of the Guerrilla Girls
1.
(New York: HarperCollins, 1995), 89.
This vulnerability and ephemereality of the posters
2.
made the Guerrilla Girls turn to the bus billboards which
also took their message into other areas of Manhattan
just as the subway cars had done for the local graffiti
writers spreading their tags across the five boroughs.
The internet has now usurped much of this access. In
response to considering how they used postering and
the forum of the street and its walls to communicate to
large audience, Frida stated, “What is the street really?
At first we did use the real street to get our message out
to the most people but now, the internet is the street. We
can reach so many more people twenty-four hours a day
through our website. The street and access continue to
change.” Author’s interview with Käthe Kollwitz and Frida
Kahlo, October 19, 2011. In his book, Vitriol: The Street
Art and Subcultures of the Punk and Hardcore Generations
(Oxford: U. of Mississippi, 2011), David Esminger also
notes how the internet with its “virtual street corners teaming with
so-called friends [and] digital flyers” has supplanted the postering
on poles and walls in the urban space. . . ,” 7.
Ethel Seno, ed., Trespass: A History of Uncommissioned
4.
Urban Art (Köln: Taschen, 2010), 22.
Tricia Rose, “A Style Nobody Can Deal With: Politics, Style in
5.
the Postindustrial City in Hip Hop” in Andrew Ross and Tricia Rose,
eds., Microphone Fiends: Youth Music and Youth Culture (New York:
Routledge, 1994), 71.
I say “their” wall because a wall rich with tagging signals a
6.
popular and active forum in which marks and counter marks are
visual chats and spars occurring over days and even months.
KANE’s email correspondence with author, October 25,
7.
2011.
Quite a bit can be said about this interjection here. In the
8.
1980s, “yo” was a black urbanism synonymous with black male
self assertion and hip hop culture. Within the bilingual context of
SoHo, “yo” also means “I” in Spanish. Therefore, in this particular
image battle, a black and/or Latino id marks, “disses” or “owns”
Ingres’s white ass and that of the posterer.
Roger Gastman and Caleb Neelon, The History of American
9.
Graffiti (New York: HarperCollins, 2010), 382.
10. DJ NO quoted in Gastman, 382.
11. KANE’s email correspondence with author, October 21,
2011. It should be mentioned that the Guerrilla Girls have had no
serious run-ins with authorities, whether in masks or not, in their
decades of postering.
12. Diedrich Diederichsen, “Street Art as a Threshold
Phenomenon” in Jeffrey Deitch, ed. Art of The Streets (Los Angeles:
Museum of Contemporary Art of Los Angeles and Rizzoli), 285.
13. Basquiat was not alone; in the 1980s in San Francisco
the writer APOLLINAIRE painted large portrait heads with speech
bubbles questioning the art establishment in underpasses.
“Museums represent the mummy of a culture that has long since
been dead.” Gastman and Neelon, 381.
14.http://www.guerrillagirls.com/posters/Montreal.shtml,last
accessed December 11, 2011.
15. Email correspondence with Käthe Kollwitz, October 26,
2011.
16. Email correspondence with Käthe Kollwitz, October 25,
2011.
17. Quoted in Nicholas Ganz, Graffiti Women: Street Art From Five
Continents (New York: Abrams, 2006), 13.
18.Ibid.
19. CLAW’s email correspondence with author, October 25,
2011.
20. This is a topic for yet another essay. For example, the
female street artist Princess Hijab compares her “hijabization” of
exposed bodies used in advertisements in and around Paris to the
feminist campaigns by the Guerrilla Girls. Working anonymously,
Hijab has been painting burkas on ad imagery since 2006.
Although she has recently revealed that she is not Muslim, she did
describes herself as racially marginalized in French society (http://
bitchmagazine.org/article/
veiled-threat). Some are less committed: one website called G.A.G.
(Guerrilla Art Girls) that gives instructions in making decorative
magnets or environmentally conscious moss graffiti bombs for the
urban landscape clarifies their relationship to the Guerrilla Girls:
“We are not much interested in being proponents of particular
politics, but rather in making people smile. We are not radical
feminists [“radical feminists” links to Guerrilla Girls in Wikipedia.
org] out to prove anything, but want to inspire curiosity and spread
cheerfulness, hopefully until you puke,” http://guerrillaartgirls.
blogspot.com/2010/05/moss-graffiti-inspiration.html, last
accessed on December 11, 2011. The Riot Grrl movement that
was original female musicians then became involved in feminist
zines also cites the Guerrilla Girls as inspiration. For more see
Nadine Monem, ed., Riot Grrl: revolution girl style now! (London:
Black Dog Publishing, 2007).
21. CHICAGLOE’s email correspondence with author, October
19, 2011.
Exhibition Checklist
Artworld Posters of 1980’s and 1990’s,
Installation of selected street posters.
Mixed media installation, digital prints
on paper
These Artists, 1985, 17"x 22"
These Galleries, 1985, 17" x 22"
Museums,1985, 17" x 22"
1986 Report Card, 1986, 22" x 17"
Women Earn 2/3, 1986, 17" x22"
Advantages of Being A Woman Artist,
1988, 17" x 22"
Racism and Sexism, 1989, 17" x 22"
Token Times,1995, 17" x 22"
Beyond Posters of 1980’s, 1990’s,
Installation of selected street posters
and projects.
Mixed media installation
The Anatomically Correct Oscar,
2002-2012
First appeared in The Nation magazine,
followed by stickers, posters, billboards
and large-scale banners.
Digital print on fabric
7’6” x 18’
Estrogen Bomb, 2003-2012
First appeared in the Village Voice,
followed by stickers and posters.
Digital print on fabric
7'6" x 7'6"
Benvenuti alla Biennale Femminista,
2005–2012
First shown at the 2005 Venice Biennale.
Digital print on fabric
11’6” x 8’
Pop Quiz, 1990, 17" x 22"
Traditional Values on Abortion,
1992, 17" x 22"
Missing in Action 1992, 17" x 22"
What’s the Difference Between a
Prisoner of War and a Homeless
Person?, 1992, 22" x 17"
Newt, 1995, 17" x 22"
10 Trashy Ideas About the Environment,
1996, 12" x 9"
Battle of the Sexes: Project for the New
Yorker, 1996, 17" x 22"
Where are the Women Artists of Venice?,
2005–2012
First shown at the 2005 Venice Biennale.
Digital print on fabric
11'6" x 8'
Love and Hate Letters, 1980’s to present
Installation of reproduced mail and email
letters sent to the Guerrilla Girls.
Mixed media installation
Unchain the Women Directors / Hay
Que Quitar Las Cadenas a Las Mujeres
Directores, 2006-2012
First appeared as billboard in Hollywood,
followed by large-scale banners in Bilbao,
Spain and Mexico City.
Digital print on fabric
7'6" x 18'
Dearest Art Collector in English, Greek
and Chinese, 1986-2012
First shown as a street poster, followed
by placards in Shanghai and large-scale
banners in Athens.
Digital prints on paper
24" x 36"
Do Women Have to be Naked to Get Into
the Met. Museum?, 1989-2011
Originally shown on NYC busses in 1989,
followed by posters, large-scale banners
and billboards. Current version has
statistics from 2011.
Digital print on fabric
8' x 18'
The Birth of Feminism Movie Poster,
2001- 2012
First appeared in Bitch magazine,
followed by posters and large-scale
banners.
Digital print on fabric
11'6" x 7'6"
The Future for Turkish Women
Artists, 2006–2012
First shown in Istanbul Modern
Museum, Turkey.
Digital print on fabric
6' x 9'
Horror on the National Mall: 2007- 2012
Appeared as a page in the Washington
Post, April, 20, 2007, followed by posters
and large-scale banners.
Digital print on fabric
8' x 5'
Museums Unfair to Men/Museums
Cave In To Radical Feminists,
2008–2012
Picket signs and photographic
documentation of collaborative action
with the Brainstormers at the Bronx
Museum and Chelsea art galleries,
New York.
Mixed media installation
Dearest Eli Broad, 2008
Action photo of posted letter written
by artists at the Broad Contemporary
Art Museum at the Los Angeles County
Museum of Art.
Panel 36” x 24”
I’m not a feminist, but…, 2009-2012
One of three large scale banners for the
Guerrilla Girls’ All-Ireland Tour developed
for Millennium Court Art Center, Belfast,
then travelled to Cork, Dublin and Kilkenny.
Interactive wall installation with visitor
contributions
Irish Toast, 2009-2012
One of three large-scale banners for the
Guerrilla Girls All-Ireland Tour developed
for Millennium Court Art Center, Belfast,
then travelled to Cork, Dublin and Kilkenny.
Digital print on fabric
9.5’ x 14'
Disturbing the Peace / Troubler le Repos,
2009–2012
First shown at the Gallery of the University
of Quebec and on the streers of Montreal.
Digital print on fabric
7'6" x 10' 6"
Chicago Museums: Time for Gender
Reassignment, 2012
Digital print on fabric
Panel 11’6” x 14’
Snap a Pic with the Guerrilla Girls, 2012
Photographic cut-outs of the artists
The Guerrilla Girls’ Bedside Companion
to the History of Western Art, 1998
Published by Penguin
Panel 24" X 36"
Bitches, Bimbos and Ballbreakers:
The Guerrilla Girls’ Guide to Female
Stereotypes, 2003
Published by Penguin
Panel 36" x 24"
The Guerrilla Girls’ Art Museum Activity
Book, 2004, 2012
Published by Printed Matter
Panel 36" x 24"
The Guerrilla Girls’ Hysterical Herstory
of Hysteria and How It Was Cured, From
Ancient Times Until Now
Installed as ten 11" x 22" panels
33
Acknowledgments
The Columbia College Chicago Department of Exhibition and Performance Spaces,
Ellen Stone Belic Institute for the Study of Women and Gender in Arts and Media,
and the A+D Gallery wish to thank the following individuals and organizations
for their assistance: Student Affairs, Critical Encounters, Ben Bilow and Creative
Services, Brandy Savarese, Student Loop, The Chronicle, Media Relations, the
Columbia College Chicago Library and the Office of the President for the support
of this year-long initiative; the Columbia College Chicago Art + Design Department,
Book and Paper Center, and the Department of Arts, Entertainment and Media
Management for the production of student workshops; and especially to the
Guerrilla Girls for enthusiastically agreeing to embark on a year-long, multifaceted, student-centered project with Columbia College Chicago and for pouring
their tireless energy, vision, and humor into Not Ready to Make Nice. We are proud
to show this body of work on Columbia’s campus and in the city of Chicago.
colum.edu
This exhibition is partially supported by The Department of Exhibition
and Performance Spaces, a division of Student Life, entirely supported
by the Student Activity Fee, the Leadership Donors of the Ellen Stone
Belic Institute for the Study of Women and Gender in the Arts and Media
at Columbia College Chicago, Chicago Foundation for Women, the Art +
Design Department and the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency.
All images are courtesy of the Guerrilla Girls unless otherwise noted.
Copyright © 2012 Guerrilla Girls
Copyright © 2012 Columbia College Chicago
ISBN: 0-929911-43-1
34
35
March 1 – April 21, 2012
a+D
AVERILL AND BERNARD LEVITON
A+D GALLERY
619 SOUTH WABASH AVENUE
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS 60605
312 369 8687
Colum.edu/adgallery
Glass Curtain GALLERY
1104 S. Wabash Avenue,
First Floor
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS 60605
312 369 6643
colum.edu/deps
August 25 – December 15, 2012
23 Essex Street
Beverly, Massachusetts 01915
montserrat.edu/galleries
36