Exhibition: Guerrilla Girls- The Art of Behaving Badly, 1985-2024

[It’s the early 1980s in New York City.] Imagine you’re artists pissed off that almost all the opportunities in the artworld go to white men. Imagine you go to a protest outside the Museum of Modern Art after it opens an “international” exhibition in 1984 with 169 artists but only thirteen women and eight artists of color. You see immediately that no museum goer even cares! Imagine you have an “aha” moment and realize there HAS to be a better way – an in-your-face, unforgettable way – to break through people’s preconceptions and prove to them that the art system isn’t a meritocracy in which museums, galleries, critics, and collectors always know best.
 
Imagine you dream up a new kind of street poster to wake people up to the pathetically low number of women artists shown in galleries and museums. You call a meeting, decide to be anonymous, and name yourselves the Guerrilla Girls. You pass the hat around to print the first posters. Within weeks you’re sneaking around New York in the middle of the night, carrying stacks of posters and buckets of glue. Your work ignites a public argument about racism and sexism in the art world. What follows? Two hundred posters, billboards, street banners, video projections, exhibitions, performances, workshops, and books – not just about the lack of gender and ethnic diversity in art, but also in film, politics, and pop culture. You get thousands of messages from people all over the world, aged eight to eighty, saying your crazy kind of activism is a model for them.
 
Over sixty individuals become members of the Guerrilla Girls. Some stay for months, some for decades, a few just for a single meeting. They’re cis, lesbian, and transgender; diverse in age, sexual orientation, and class; and from many different ethnic backgrounds – South Asian, African American, Latinx, and European; and so on. Each takes on the name of a dead woman artist as a pseudonym.

These days we feel in our gut that something important has changed. No longer can anyone claim that the history of art and culture can be written without including all the diverse voices of that culture. But museums, galleries, and art collecting are still dominated by big money and white men. For the history of art to be more than the story of wealth and power, that must change. Our work is not finished. We invite you to look through this exhibition, get mad, and keep up the fight. Creative complaining works!

–Guerrilla Girls: The Art of Behaving Badly, Chronicle Books, 2020