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The Guerrilla Girls are an anonymous activist group who utilise disruptive visuals and striking statistics to protest gender and racial biases in the art world. They use “guerrilla”-like tactics – loud posters and protests – to expose these issues, whilst wearing gorilla masks to ensure they remain anonymous. The art collective believes in undermining the hegemonic masculinity that is evident in art – through income inequality, the value of the wealthy and Hollywood, art censorship, discrimination, government corruption and gendered bias. The Guerrilla Girls formed in 1985, and are most well-known for their work, Do Women Have to Be Naked to Get Into the Met. Museum?, which was produced in 1989 after the collective walked through the Met and counted the ratio of female artists to female nudes. They found less than 5% of the Modern Art artists are women, but 85% of the nudes are female. And this is still true today – I googled “paintings by women’, and Google presented me with over 20 paintings of women by men before I stumbled across a Frida Kahlo work in their midst.
A member of the Guerrilla Girls told the New York Times, ‘How can you really tell the story of a culture when you don’t include all the voices within the culture?’. After 40 years, the activist group continues to argue against the dominating white male presence inhe art scene, stating that they have ‘only just begun’.
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