Guerrilla Girls
Entity type:
Organization
Guerrilla Girls is an anonymous group of feminist, female artists devoted to fighting sexism and racism within the art world. The group formed in New York City, United States in 1985, born out of a picket against the Museum of Modern Art the previous year. The core of the group's work is bringing gender and racial inequality into focus within the greater arts community and society at large.
The Guerrilla Girls employ culture jamming in the form of posters, books, billboards, lectures, interviews, public appearances and internet interventions to expose disparities, discrimination, and corruption (the latter includes conflicts of interest within museums). They also often use humor in their work to make their serious messages engaging. The Guerrilla Girls are known for their "guerrilla" tactics, hence their name, such as hanging up posters or staging surprise exhibitions.
To remain anonymous, members don gorilla masks. On interviews, they use pseudonyms that refer to deceased female artists such as Frida Kahlo, Käthe Kollwitz, and Alice Neel, as well as writers and activists, such as Gertrude Stein and Harriet Tubman. According to GG1, identities are concealed because issues matter more than individual identities: "Mainly, we wanted the focus to be on the issues, not on our personalities or our own work."
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