Guerrilla Girls

The Guerrilla Girls are a group of anonymous American feminist artists founded in New York in 1985 who seek to expose sexual and racial discrimination in the art world and the wider cultural sphere. Its members appear in gorilla masks, concealing their identities, and adopt as pseudonyms the names of dead women artists of the past, such as Käthe Kollwitz or Frida Kahlo. This anonymity allows them to keep attention on the issues rather than on their own personalities, while also protecting them from possible reprisals within the art establishment. The group's best-known weapon has been its bold posters, stickers and billboards presenting pointed facts and statistics that document the unequal representation of women and non-white artists in museums, galleries and collections. A classic example is the 1989 poster asking whether women have to be naked to get into the museum, which ironically compared the proportion of women artists with the proportion of female nudes in the collection of a major museum. Through their work, which combines activism, humour and visual design, the Guerrilla Girls have profoundly influenced feminist critique of art institutions and remain active to this day.