Guerrilla Girls: Behind the Mask

Installation of Guerrilla Girls prints at the Milwaukee Art Museum. Photo credit: Tina Schinabeck.

Prints from the portfolio Guerrilla Girls Talk Back: The First Five Years will be on view in the Milwaukee Art Museum’s contemporary galleries through February 2017. This article was originally written by former Museum intern Emma Fallone for Dimensions, an undergraduate journal of Art and Art History published by Yale University, when she was a student at Yale.

One dark night in 1985, Frida Kahlo sped through the midnight streets of New York City in a gorilla mask. Her name, however, was not really Frida, and she owned neither the car that she drove nor the mask that she wore. In the trunk and surrounded by tubs of glue, paintbrushes, and two large rolled-up posters sat Frida’s similarly masked friend and fellow artist, who had taken the pseudonym Käthe Kollwitz. Their audacious plan for that evening had been unthinkable mere months earlier. Now emboldened by their new identities and motivated to speak out against injustice, a determined Frida and Käthe passed the night papering the city with bold posters, setting into an action a movement that would endure for decades.

The Guerrilla Girls had officially struck.

Guerrilla Girls (American, established 1985), You’re seeing only 1/2 the picture without the vision…, from the portfolio Guerrilla Girls Talk Back: The First Five Years, 1984–89. Offset lithograph. Milwaukee Art Museum, Purchase, with funds from Peggy Daum Judge Bequest M1993.302.26. Photo credit: Tina Schinabeck. © Guerrilla Girls.

The idea for Frida and Käthe’s audacious midnight excursion arose as a response to the opening of the Museum of Modern Art’s summer 1984 exhibition, “International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture.” The show claimed to represent all the best art talent in recent years; yet of the artists lauded, only seventeen – less than nine percent – were women. A statement by MoMA curator Kynaston McShine added insult to the already-egregious injury. “Anyone who’s not in my show should rethink his career.” The implications of this single sentence – that single word: his – were astounding.

Female artists weren’t being intentionally excluded.

It was worse: they simply weren’t even being considered.

Guerrilla Girls (American, established 1985), Guerrilla Girls Review the Whitney (Clocktower Show), from the portfolio Guerrilla Girls Talk Back: The First Five Years, 1984–89. Offset lithograph. Milwaukee Art Museum, Purchase, with funds from Peggy Daum Judge Bequest M1993.302.15. Photo credit: Tina Schinabeck. © Guerrilla Girls.

The Guerrilla Girls started as an ad-hoc late night gathering of incensed female artists. They knew they needed to react, to challenge the long-held, dangerous assumptions of the male-dominant art world. For their protest to be successful, it had to intrude into people’s lives, induce discomfort, and inspire controversy. Thus, the Girls were born. As artists, graphic posters were the obvious choice as a weapon for rebellion. In the name of anonymity, the women disguised themselves with gorilla masks and pseudonyms drawn from female artists throughout history. No one could have predicted the enormous symbolic weight that these flimsy costume props would carry in the years to come.

The strategy of that first night became the norm over the years, as the Girls continued their “attacks,” designing new posters each time. Early ones simply listed the names of galleries who tended to exhibit male over female artists, but their content soon grew more brazen. They covered the walls of the city with glaring statistics: “Bus companies are more enlightened than NYC art galleries! 49.2% of bus drivers are female, 16% of artists represented by major NYC galleries are female” and confrontational messages: “Do women have to be naked to get into the Met Museum?” The movement gained media attention, leading feminist artists across the country to rise up in similar protests of gender inequality.

Guerrilla Girls (American, established 1985), The Advantages of being a Woman Artist:, from the portfolio Guerrilla Girls Talk Back: The First Five Years, 1984–89.Offset lithograph.Purchase, with funds from Peggy Daum Judge Bequest M1993.302.18. Photo credit: Tina Schinabeck. © Guerrilla Girls.

In just a few years, the Guerrilla Girls had proven that when fueled by a burning passion, it could take little more than cheap plastic masks and poster glue to enact change.

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In late September of 2014, I attended a talk given by Guerrilla Girl Frida Kahlo at Fairfield University. Although several decades had passed since those fateful nights, Frida Kahlo’s appearance remained frozen in time, clad as she was in the simple black garments and exaggerated gorilla mask worn by all Guerrilla Girls in order to preserve their anonymity. The audience of young college students sat with polite indifference, notebooks in hand, their attendance clearly motivated by the prospect of extra credit in a history course rather than any genuine interest in the speaker. For this generation born a decade after the height of the Guerrilla Girls’ infamy, the Girls’ name held no more meaning than that of a mildly successful eighties rock band – something vaguely familiar perhaps, but of a forgotten significance.

Guerrilla Girls (American, established 1985), Guerrilla Girls Code of Ethics for Art Museums:, from the portfolio Guerrilla Girls Talk Back: The First Five Years, 1984–89. Offset lithograph. Purchase, with funds from Peggy Daum Judge Bequest M1993.302.28. Photo credit: Tina Schinabeck. © Guerrilla Girls.

Something was missing. Today, the Guerrilla Girls have a website, a Facebook page, and even purchasable tote bags. Yet the group no longer makes headlines like they did in the turbulent days of the late 1980s. Instead of late night escapades, the Girls are engaged in a multi-year U.S. tour visiting dozens of college campuses and institutions to host panels and workshops about feminism.

It could be argued that the dialogue about equal representation of female artists has largely fallen from the media eye today. It is true that there have occasionally been articles published in online blogs decrying depressing statistics on the number of female artists in recent museum shows, such as the Whitney Biennial. But there hasn’t arisen the same passionate, concentrated rage that the Guerrilla Girls once embodied. This relative silence would lead some to infer that sexism within the art community is simply no longer an issue in today’s enlightened society.

This assumption could not be further from the truth.

Guerrilla Girls (American, established 1985), We sell White Bread…, from the portfolio Guerrilla Girls Talk Back: The First Five Years, 1984–89. Offset lithograph. Milwaukee Art Museum, Purchase, with funds from Peggy Daum Judge Bequest M1993.302.17. Photo credit: Tina Schinabeck. © Guerrilla Girls.

According to a 2011 count, only 4% of the artists in the Modern and Contemporary sections of MOMA were women, while 76% of the nudes were female – a statistic stunningly similar to those splashed across the Girls’ posters decades ago. Where is the urgency, the outrage in today’s society? If it still exists, which it must, perhaps the Guerrilla Girls simply no longer embody it the same way that they did in the mid-1980s.

At the end of Frida’s Fairfield University talk, one of the students stood to ask a question: “Thank you for your story – but I guess I’m confused about your group’s status in society today. You talk about rebellion and activism, but I’ve only seen your posters in museums or art history textbooks, not out on city streets.” Frida Kahlo looked out at the audience. The scene verged on absurd: a short, elderly woman standing politely behind the podium, well dressed in a black pantsuit and sensible shoes, yet wearing a large plastic gorilla mask. In response, she gave only a question. “What do you do when the art institutions you’ve spent your entire life attacking suddenly embrace you?” In the silence of the lecture hall, I could almost hear Frida’s quiet sigh.

The Guerrilla Girls are not alone in their struggle. Many controversial, anti-establishment artists of the late twentieth century are now facing similar dilemmas. Their acceptance by the very museums their art was created criticized calls these artists’ most basic identities into question. The Girls’ original scrappy posters have now become art objects, selling for thousands of dollars at auction. In 2006, the Tate Modern devoted an entire room to the Guerrilla Girls’ work; other prominent institutions including the Yale University Art Gallery also have collected these pieces. The Guerrilla Girls’ posters have even been shown at the Museum of Modern Art, hanging mere meters away from the artworks that they were created to condemn. It would of course be foolish to miss such opportunities as these to share the Girls’ works with a mass audience, preserving their posters for posterity in world-class institutions around the globe. Yet, the question lingers: by allowing themselves to be drawn into the mainstream, are these artists also implicitly rendering their artworks impotent?

Guerrilla Girls (American, established 1985), When racism and sexism are no longer fashionable…, from the portfolio Guerrilla Girls Talk Back: The First Five Years, 1984–89. Offset lithograph. Milwaukee Art Museum, Purchase, with funds from Peggy Daum Judge Bequest M1993.302.23. Photo credit: Tina Schinabeck. © Guerrilla Girls.

Frida acknowledged such concerns about the future of the art world at the end of her talk, offering a bold suggestion. “We Guerrilla Girls recognize that perhaps it’s time for a new generation of rebels, for today’s young millennials to pick up the torch and continue our crusade for equality. And we would certainly support such a movement!” As of now, it remains to be seen if there will be such a powerful rebirth of the Feminist art movement in the twenty-first century. Until that day, Frida and her Girls continue to traverse the United States, scouring countless lecture halls in the hopes of finding a young face that burns with the same passion they themselves once felt one fateful night so many years ago.

—Emma Fallone, Former Milwaukee Art Museum Intern