How to Be a Guerrilla Girl

Coinciding with the Guerrilla Girls’ 40th anniversary, How to Be a Guerrilla Girl, on view November 18, 2025, through April 12, 2026, offers a rare, behind-the-scenes look into the inner workings of the iconic feminist art collective. Drawing from the Getty Research Institute’s remarkable Guerrilla Girls archive, the exhibition highlights the strategies—anonymity, data gathering, protest actions, culture jamming, and grassroots distribution—that have defined the group’s groundbreaking practice since the mid-1980s.

The Guerrilla Girls have created a newly-commissioned work for the exhibition that explores the Getty's own collection of European painting and sculpture. Using comic strip style speech bubbles, they reimagine the voices of women represented in these artworks through a twenty-first century lens. The commission exposes deeply rooted biases in the representation of women in Guerilla Girls characteristic witty style.

“The Getty Research Institute is delighted to present this exhibition marking four decades of Guerrilla Girl art and activism. The group's archive allows us to understand the crucial role they have played in the art world and the strategic thinking and collective labor behind their most famous interventions, while introducing us to lesser-known aspects of the groups’ practice,” says Andrew Perchuk, Interim Director of the Getty Research Institute.

The exhibition offers a sustained look into the archive, which documents the first two decades of Guerrilla Girls activity, and was acquired in 2008. The archive was amassed as the collective worked on projects, with members of the group depositing working drafts of posters, fan mail, photo shoots, internal correspondence, video and audio cassettes, and data tallies at a shared space. In the exhibition, the Guerrilla Girls’ best-known posters will be seen alongside this revealing material shedding light on the Guerrilla Girls’ practice as it developed within the social and cultural context of the late 20th-Century culture wars. Through this periodization, the show will contextualize their understandings of gender and intersectional feminism, their media practices of culture jamming, and their critical approach to art history.

“The Guerrilla Girls give us a blueprint for art and activism that is incredibly effective. Our goal is to show visitors the toolkit for artistic activism developed by the Guerrilla Girls, and that it can still be applied today, whatever the issues they care about may be,” says two of the exhibition’s curators Zanna Gilbert and Kristin Juarez.

Masked Avengers

The exhibition begins by introducing the origins of the Guerrilla Girls, born out of frustration with systemic sexism in the art world. In response to a 1984 MoMA exhibition that featured only 13 women among 169 artists, a group of anonymous women artists took action. Adopting gorilla masks and the names of overlooked women artists from history, they launched their first poster campaigns in the streets of New York City.

Using bold graphics, satirical humor, and hard-hitting statistics, their messages were impossible to ignore. Early works––including rare posters, original mockups, and brainstorming notes––are featured alongside photography that documents their public interventions and the invention of their personas.

One of the Guerrilla Girls’ most iconic posters, Advantages of Being a Woman Artist, takes center stage in this section. Visitors can view original working documents that show the collaborative evolution of the ideas that led to the final work.

The Conscience of the Art World

This section explores how the Guerrilla Girls used art to address not only gender discrimination but also racism, corruption, and inequality within cultural institutions––and beyond. Their protest art has appeared at rallies, museums, and on city streets, where they have advocated for reproductive rights, condemned sexual violence, and demanded systemic accountability. Here, a larger-than-life adaptation of Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa with a fig leaf covering her mouth greets visitors, a graphic that was originally made for their billboard First They Want to Take Away A Woman’ Right to Choose…Now They’re Censoring Art.

All You Have to Do Is Count

Data has long been one of the Guerrilla Girls’ sharpest tools. This section focuses on their investigative approach, showcasing rare materials from their 1987 Clocktower exhibition and critiques of institutions like the Whitney Biennial. Archival photographs, annotated charts, research files, handwritten tallies, and installation designs show how statistics were transformed into persuasive visual activism.

Featured here is Do Women Have To Be Naked To Get Into The Met. Museum? (1989), a groundbreaking work critiquing the hypocrisy of art institutions that revere the nude female form while sidelining women artists. Visitors will see an early design of the piece, which first appeared as a bus ad, as well as updated versions from 2005 and 2012.

I’m a Guerrilla Girl and I’m Not Angry

As the Guerrilla Girls gained momentum, they expanded their reach to television studios, lecture halls, universities, and talk shows—using mass media to amplify their message long before the internet era. This section highlights the performative nature of their activism with archival footage displayed across a series of screens, from press appearances to live "gig" documentation that sparked dialogue about power, representation, and resistance.

XOXO, Guerrilla Girls

The final section of the exhibition examines correspondence as a framework for the Guerrilla Girls practice. They used letter writing as a recurring mode of address in their works, such as the Dearest Art Collector poster series, signing them with a cheeky “xoxo” and lipstick kiss. The group circulated their materials via a PO Box, whose address was stamped on all posters. Many of their posters were produced as distributable postcards, stickers and Xeroxes. Implicitly soliciting a reply, this method sought to activate a conversation and enact change. A selection of the archive’s trove of fan mail testifies to the broad impact of their activism, and the deep engagement they maintained with their audiences.

Their growing influence also led to the creation of Guerrilla Girls merchandise––buttons, t-shirts, and more—which cemented their place in pop culture. A selection of these items is on display.

The exhibition concludes with a participatory “graffitti wall” installation inviting visitors to air their grievances—whether humorous, serious, or somewhere in between. First created in 1987, this project continues the Guerrilla Girls’ legacy of inviting the public to join them in what they call “creative complaining”.

“We are thrilled that the GRI has crafted this unique exhibition. In 1985 we created a new kind of political art that uses facts and outrageous visuals—and has the power to change people's minds. Our motto then and now: Do one thing, If it works, do another, if it doesn’t, do another anyway. Whether it’s our work about art and culture or our work about what’s going on in the U.S. and other countries, our fight for freedom, equality and justice in the art world and beyond is not over. Love, Guerrilla Girls.”

How to Be a Guerrilla Girl is curated by Zanna Gilbert, Senior Research Specialist, Kristin Juarez, Senior Research Specialist, Thisbe Gensler, Public Programming Specialist, Alex Jones, Curatorial Assistant, Daniela Ruano Orantes, Curatorial Assistant, and Megan Sallabedra, Collection Development Librarian.

In tandem with the exhibition, Getty will host the Guerrilla Girls in conversation with Roxane Gay, a feminist Valentine’s Day mail art workshop with the Feminist Center for Creative Work, Cocktails with the Curators, tours, and other programs.