PESTS

PESTS was an anonymous protest group of artists active in New York in the 1980s whose aim was to expose discrimination and tokenism directed at artists from racial minorities by commercial galleries, museums and other art institutions. The group was close in spirit and method to the well-known Guerrilla Girls, but it focused primarily on the problem of racial rather than gender inequality in the art world. Its members preserved their anonymity and distributed leaflets, posters and newsletters in which, by means of facts, names and statistics, they documented the systematic neglect of non-white artists, their meagre representation in exhibitions and collections, and the practice of tokenism, the symbolic inclusion of a few individual artists for the sake of visible diversity without any real change. The activity of PESTS coincided with a period of intensified debate about multiculturalism, identity and representation in American art. Although the group was short-lived, it played a notable part in the wider movement for racial justice in the art world and testified to a growing critical awareness of structural inequality in art institutions at the end of the twentieth century.