Guerrilla Girls

Since their inception in 1984, the Guerrilla Girls have been working to expose sexual and racial discrimination in the art world, particularly in New York, and in the wider cultural arena. The group’s members protect their identities by wearing gorilla masks in public and by assuming pseudonyms taken from such deceased famous female figures as the writer Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) and the artist Frida Kahlo (1907-54). They formed in response to the International Survey of Painting and Sculpture held in 1984 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. The exhibition included the work of 169 artists, less than 10% of whom were women. Although female artists had played a central role in experimental American art of the 1970s, with the economic boom of the early 1980s in which artwork prices rose steeply, their presence in museum and gallery exhibitions diminished dramatically. Dubbing themselves the ‘conscience of the art world’, in 1985 the Guerrilla Girls began a poster campaign that targeted museums, dealers, curators, critics and artists who they felt were actively responsible for, or complicit in, the exclusion of women and non-white artists from mainstream exhibitions and publications.

Do Women Have To Be Naked To Get Into the Met. Museum? is notable for many reasons. Firstly, this is one of the first posters produced by the Guerrilla Girls that uses a variety of eye-catching colors as opposed to previous posters which were black and white, or utilized one color. This piece uses grayscale in addition to the bright colors pink and yellow, which almost create the illusion of vibration when juxtaposed. Secondly, up until this point the Guerrilla Girls’ posters made effective use of text-based posters. But this poster incorporates imagery in addition to statistics the Guerrilla Girls gathered while spending a day surveying the Met. They parodied a famous nude painting of a woman, La Grande Odalisque by Jean-August-Dominique Ingres, by taking the naked figure laying back in a relaxed position and placing a gorilla head over her face. Third, it really showed the boldness and passion for equal representation that the Guerrilla Girls possessed, as they went after the Met with the intention of shaming and humiliating such a prestigious art institution.^[1]