Inside the Guerrilla Girls

In 1989, the Guerrilla Girls—an anonymous collective of feminist artist activists—shocked New York City with a bright pink-and-yellow bus ad featuring a famous nude from art history, her face obscured by a gorilla mask, and some eye-opening statistics about one of Manhattan’s most prestigious museums.

Under the provocative headline “Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum?” the poster stated, “Less than 5% of the artists in the Modern Art sections are women, but 85% of the nudes are female.”

At the time, the now-famous naked figure in the ad—a gorilla-headed reimagining of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s La Grande Odalisque—ruffled more feathers than the numbers. The Public Art Fund, which had originally commissioned the piece as a billboard, rejected the design because it wasn’t “clear enough,” according to the book Guerrilla Girls: The Art of Behaving Badly. After the collective paid to run the ad anyway, on New York City’s buses, the bus company canceled the Guerrilla Girls’ advertising lease because the image “was too suggestive,” as the Guerrilla Girls tell it in their book Confessions of the Guerrilla Girls.

But that initial reaction did not stop the Guerrilla Girls—who take their name from their guerrilla style of art making and wear gorilla masks to focus public attention on issues of equity in the art world and beyond, rather than their individual personas. (According to Guerrilla Girls’ lore, the anonymizing disguise stems from a gorilla/guerrilla misspelling during the group’s early days.) The collective is still reproducing Do Women Have to Be Naked to Get into the Met. Museum? for followers all over the world, taking the image concept on tour to new municipalities and updating its statistics every few years with a fresh set of numbers directly from the Met.

That relentless search for data-driven truth continues to motivate the Guerrilla Girls more than 35 years later and comes to light in How to Be a Guerrilla Girl, a new exhibition at the Getty Research Institute (GRI). The show draws on the first 15 years of the Guerrilla Girls’ archives—now housed at the GRI—to commemorate the collective’s 40th anniversary, reveal its collaborative creative process, and offer new insights into its analog methods of production and information gathering. The exhibition also highlights the Guerrilla Girls’ ongoing activism, primarily with a participatory chalkboard wall that invites visitors to write out creative complaints, and a new commission by the Guerrilla Girls that rethinks the representation of women in Western art through works in Getty’s own collection.

“The Guerrilla Girls are artists, they’re activists, they’re a feminist collective,” says Kristin Juarez, a senior research specialist at the GRI and one of the exhibition’s curators. “These are all ways of working that have the ability to disrupt the status quo, and what a good time to be questioning and considering how we want to move forward... The show really does speak to different modes of speaking out.”

Showcasing hate and fan mail, working drafts, lecture notes, poster mock-ups, and a media wall featuring recorded appearances, the presentation documents the collective’s multifaceted strategies and iterative process, demonstrating how the Guerrilla Girls not only executed elaborate creative campaigns to bring awareness to biases in the art world but also turned to simple and tenacious techniques to challenge authority in museums, galleries, and beyond. Over years of archival research, exhibition curators discovered that some of the Guerrilla Girls’ most inventive poster concepts came together in a flash, while others required deep data mining, including the unearthing of elite art world intel to expose the industry’s deep inequities.

All you have to do is count

When asked whether the shocking stats they cited in their posters were accurate, the Guerrilla Girls had a ready comeback: “All you have to do is count.” That whip-smart retort informs an entire section of the exhibition, showing how the Guerrilla Girls sourced statistics for posters and mocked them up through iterative, collaborative, and analog processes.

The section showcases not only the original mock-up, or pasteup, for the famed gorilla-headed bus ad but also iterations of the poster over multiple years. The Guerrilla Girls revisited the Met twice in the early 2000s to update the statistics. While the poster’s concept has remained the same, the percentages of female inclusion have gotten worse. According to Kathe Kollwitz, a cofounder of the Guerrilla Girls (who maintain their anonymity through the use of the names of deceased female artists), “it’s really hard to push that rock up a hill.”

Kollwitz observes that the biggest change the piece has undergone over the years has been technological. Before the rise and widespread use of desktop publishing software, she remembers the retro process of cutting and gluing pasteups, like the mock-up of the gorilla-crowned La Grande Odalisque in the exhibition, to indicate to the printer where colors should go.

“We had to cut out the figure … with a razor blade,” Kollwitz recalls, “and then you give that to a printer with a layout… It was a whole different thing. Now it’s instant.” She adds of the pasteup process: “I don’t know what people are going to make of it today. Most people don’t even know that was what you had to do all those decades ago.”

Frida Kahlo, another cofounder of the Guerrilla Girls, also remembers how she sourced a photographic slide of La Grande Odalisque for the pasteup. “I sort of borrowed the slide from the slide library where I was teaching,” confesses Kahlo, adding a touch of color to the origin story. “I can’t remember if I gave it back,” she says with a chuckle.

The Guerrilla Girls were also resourceful with their research methods. Between juggling day jobs, art practices, and, for some, parenthood—“we were all really busy,” Kahlo says. So the group leveraged its collective brainpower and distribution across the art world to conduct a flash accounting style members called “five-minute research projects” to gather information quickly across a wide range of publicly available datasets.

“It was a means to an end,” notes Zanna Gilbert, a GRI senior research specialist and another of the exhibition’s curators. “They weren’t going to get bogged down in the research piece. They were opportunistic in finding straightforward ways of getting the information that they needed.”

“We were never statisticians,” reiterates Kahlo. “We never gathered information just to gather information. We always had a goal.”

Guerrilla girl math

Tucked away in the archives, tally sheets reveal the artists’ back-of-the-envelope calculations for scoring some of New York’s top art galleries on their representation of women and artists of color during the mid-1980s and ’90s. The sheets stemmed from swift flip-throughs of Art in America’s annual gallery guide to quantify the number of women and artists of color represented by New York’s most elite galleries. Such quick calculations shaped the style for posters, such as the Guerrilla Girls’ 1986 Report Card, which shamed galleries, like Marlborough and Washburn, with “failing” or “unacceptable” marks for female representation.

“‘Boy crazy,’ ‘lacks initiative,’ and ‘could do even better’” were some of the other comments, Kahlo remembers. “The statistics are awful, but for us to infantilize the galleries by making them appear to be disobedient and lazy students was a lot of fun.” “We certainly tried our best,” says Kollwitz, when it came to the calculations, “but it was pretty easy because the number of women was always so low.” Where some might see only scratch paper, researchers see the groundwork for the Guerrilla Girls’ most piercing posters and a thoughtful data collection technique, made significant by its pre-Internet compilation.

“People assume that data is just everywhere,” observes Megan Sallabedra, digital collection development librarian at the GRI and another curatorial team member, who researched the group’s data collection techniques. “That’s something we take for granted now. [Data’s] on a spreadsheet that you can pick up, or you can just Google it, but it doesn’t already exist. You have to do the counting… And I think the Guerrilla Girls are really great at making [data] digestible for a broad audience.”

“They didn’t make up the numbers,” Juarez adds. “They weren’t about just taking down institutions out of hearsay…. They’re taking rumor and turning it into evidence… Research gives them the fuel to make a whole suite of posters, including Do Women Have to Be Naked to Get into the Met. Museum?”

Deep data mining and a Whitney mole

When simply showing the numbers wasn’t enough, the Guerrilla Girls worked like investigative reporters to deeply research their subject matter, ethically source gatekept museum information, and expose hypocrisy in the art world.

For instance, to assemble Hot Flashes, their National Endowment for the Arts–funded “feminist watchdog journal” (copies of which will be on view at the exhibition), the group pored over a year’s worth of issues of the New York Times on microfilm at the New York Public Library to evaluate how female artists and artists of color were covered—or not—in the paper —“which I think permanently damaged a lot of our vision,” Kahlo recalls.

This deep dive into the New York Times’s art coverage not only demonstrates the tenacity of the Guerrilla Girls’ “creative research tactics,” as Kollwitz describes them, but also their “reparative work” and interrogation of “the biases within the journalistic standards of language,” notes Juarez.

Like reporters driven to get to the bottom of a story, “they used the New York Times as a kind of data, a source in which to better understand how artists were being recorded and remembered, and by extension, how art history is being made,” Juarez says.

A GRI oral history also reveals that the collective connected with a source working within the Whitney Museum’s development department to compile data for the 1987 Clocktower Gallery show Guerrilla Girls Review the Whitney. According to Kollwitz and Kahlo’s account (available through the GRI’s library), the source—who archivists refer to as “the Whitney mole” and remains nameless to protect their identity—leaked privileged details collected by the department, including donors’ business affiliations and even their dogs’ names, to the Guerrilla Girls.

That intel later resurfaced in Guerrilla Girls Review the Whitney. Through witty and withering data visualizations, the show critiqued the Whitney Biennial’s dearth of diverse artists, especially women, and revealed that the museum’s major donors made fortunes from female-focused brands like Estée Lauder and Victoria’s Secret. Juarez notes that the “brilliance” of this exhibition stems from the collective’s fearless approach.

“They’re challenging the Whitney Biennial as an exhibition practice,” explains Juarez. “Its core premise is that it is the most reflective exhibition of the state of American art. So for [the Guerrilla Girls] to say, ‘How can you have that conceit and not have equity in the artists that you’re exhibiting?’—they were really exposing the biases within this premier exhibition.”

While Kahlo says the relationship with the mole developed organically by running in similar art world circles, she notes that it was hard to gather information for these early works pre-Internet. “To be honest, a lot of the information was very confidential,” she says. “It wasn’t easy to find out what a museum had acquired in a year or how much their donors gave to the museum, so we had to really dig deep.”

“We had to be very clever, and just always figure out new and unusual ways to discover information,” adds Kollwitz. “We oftentimes called it subversive use of information.”

Cheeky valentines, pink calling cards, and gigs

Posters and broadsheets weren’t the only means by which the Guerrilla Girls campaigned against sexism and racism in the art world. The exhibition and archival documents also show how the Guerrilla Girls wielded the power of snail mail to spread their antidiscrimination messages with cheeky Valentines, postcards, and correspondence, as well as scripts for public appearances and lectures, or “gigs,” as the group also called them.

“This is the bread and butter of how the Guerrilla Girls were able to spread the word,” Juarez says. “This was, of course, before email. It was the primary mode of circulation, but they really used it because they didn’t have a gallery. For them, it wasn’t about making their work more valuable. It was about getting the message out to people.”

According to the exhibition’s curators, one of the most popular queries the Guerrilla Girls received asked how the letter writer could become a Guerrilla Girl. While official entry into the group’s ranks remains by invitation only, the collective came up with creative ways to encourage followers to “be a Guerrilla Girl in spirit,” including passing out small pink calling cards their public appearances with specific instructions on “How to Become a Guerilla Girl” in two steps: “1) Think of the name of a black woman artist,” and “2) Pass it on to a curator or collector.”

The card not only gives the exhibition its name, says Juarez, but is also a reminder that “you don’t have to become a Guerrilla Girl to find your way to use your voice”—a key takeaway of the show.

“We know from people who’ve written to us, who tell us when they see this, they want to go out and do their own thing. And we hope that is something that happens in this exhibition,” Kollwitz says.