Everyone has a favorite line from the Guerrilla Girls’ famous poster The Advantages of Being a Woman Artist, I learned while eavesdropping at their recent Getty exhibition. My own might be the piercing seventh item: “Seeing your ideas live on in the work of others.” Or maybe the perfectly understated, perfectly deadpan opener: “Working without the pressure of success.”
The Getty holds a substantial archive of the Guerrilla Girls’ working papers, dating back to their beginnings as an anonymous activist collective in 1985. Vitrines show multiple typewritten and handwritten drafts of The Advantages of Being a Woman Artist, which they made in 1988. The drafts are covered with editorial notes and revisions, suggesting the atmosphere of a comedy writers’ room, with everyone working over the jokes until they’re exactly right. The initial idea for Advantages had two columns running down the page, with the perks of being a male artist on the left side and those of being a female one on the right. The list of male advantages, evoking old boys’ clubs and double standards, is more caustic than the female side: “Being collected by the Met before you collect social security.” “Making politically correct art and having a politically incorrect private life.” “Getting tenure without teaching.” “Playing racquet ball w/ male art collectors.” “Letting your grey hair show.”
Through the series of drafts the male list gets progressively covered in cross-outs, then disappears entirely. Some of the female items also get cut (“Paying lower life insurance rates,” “Making pure art that doesn’t depend on the marketplace”). The result is a work with flawless tonal control. The workaday frustration and bitterness have been burned off. You can infer a world of anger and pain behind each line, but you don’t have to feel it—someone has already done that for you. A passerby who saw one of the Guerrilla Girls putting up the Advantages poster downtown offered to give the group money to run it as a full-page ad in Artforum. They took her up on it. The poster has long since gone around the world, translated into languages including Russian, Portuguese, Japanese, and Malayalam.
The male side of the list may have dropped out simply because it was less funny, but it also might have revealed too clearly a complicating truth: success was elusive for male artists as well. Even if they were white, even if they had wives to take care of their children, few men would find their work in the Met or play racquetball with collectors. A male artist walking by the poster, instead of opening his wallet, might note with some irony of his own that his supposed advantages had yet to accrue. It’s a paradox that the Guerrilla Girls became wildly popular fighting for a shot at an extremely rarefied form of success.
Some of the original Guerrilla Girls were veterans of 1970s art protest groups. The Getty exhibition (which has no catalog) doesn’t provide information on art world protests that preceded the Guerrilla Girls, but overlapping groups of artists and art workers had been demonstrating for representational diversity in museums—among other causes—since the late 1960s. In 1968 twelve protesters from a group that soon began to call itself the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition (BECC) picketed in front of the Whitney in response to the exclusion of Black artists from the museum’s exhibition “The 1930s: Painting and Sculpture in America.” A year later the BECC protested the Met over its remarkable failure to include any paintings or sculptures by Black artists in “Harlem on My Mind,” an exhibition that showed documentary photography and news clippings about Black cultural life but no other works of art.
One of its members was Faith Ringgold, who later also joined the Art Workers’ Coalition, a loose affiliation of artists, curators, and critics who combined antiwar protest with agitation for populist changes in New York art institutions (more work by Black, Puerto Rican, and female artists; free access to museums) and concerns about artists’ wages and rights over their work. As the art historian Julia Bryan-Wilson notes in Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era (2011), in the postwar decades more artists than ever had MFA degrees but no reliable path to an income.
A rush of how-to books, articles, and workshops (satirized in John Baldessari’s late-Sixties painting Tips for Artists Who Want to Sell) promised to teach the newly credentialed artists how to find buyers for their work. An article in the Saturday Review in 1970 cited a report by the prestigious artist residency program MacDowell, based on a survey of its award winners, that indicated that only one in ten painters and sculptors “was able to support himself and his family on what he earned from sales of his work.” Members of the AWC floated a variety of possible solutions to this problem. Some wanted to form a union. Some wanted universal wages for artists. Some wanted to eradicate the institutions of the art world entirely.
They didn’t get very far into the specifics of any of these plans. In May 1970 the AWC participated in the Art Strike Against Racism, Sexism, Repression, and War, but by the end of 1971 the group had disbanded. Some of the female members—including Ringgold and the curator and critic Lucy Lippard—formed the Ad Hoc Committee of Women Artists, which staged months of sit-ins at the Whitney over the underrepresentation of women in its Painting Annual and Sculpture Annual (now known as the Whitney Biennial), demanding 50 percent female representation in the next annual, with half of those women being nonwhite.* The protesters placed raw eggs and tampons around the museum, then printed a fake press release from the Whitney conceding to their fifty-fifty demands (forcing the museum to issue a real press release saying it had done no such thing). Ringgold and her daughter Michele Wallace also formed Women Students and Artists for Black Art Liberation; an archive photo shows Wallace among a group of smiling protesters at the Whitney holding a stenciled sign that reads, “50% BLACK WOMEN ARTISTS.”
In a similar vein several years later the artist Joanne Stamerra, a member of the Guerrilla Art Action Group, deposited pink erasers stenciled with “ERASE SEXISM AT MOMA” at various locations around the museum in protest of its exhibition “Drawing Now” (1976), which showed only five women out of forty-six artists.
On the West Coast in 1971 a new feminist group called the Los Angeles Council of Women Artists was dismayed to find that the “Art and Technology” exhibition at LACMA included no women among its sixteen artists. In a move that anticipated the data-based work of the Guerrilla Girls, its members dug through the archives at LACMA and found that in the previous decade, only one solo show (out of a total of fifty-three) had been dedicated to the work of a woman. In group shows over the same period, only 4 percent of the works were by women. They published a report compiling all the statistics and held a press conference, well covered by local news outlets, in which they demanded 50 percent representation for women in LACMA’s future exhibitions of contemporary art as well as in board membership and museum hiring.
A decade later artists protested LACMA yet again, furious that its new exhibition, “Art in Los Angeles: Seventeen Artists in the Sixties” (1981), focused on a handful of already famous white men associated with the Ferus Gallery, at the expense of other, underrepresented artists working in Los Angeles. The hundred-some protesters wore masks depicting the exhibition’s curator, Maurice Tuchman, creating a sea of uniformly white male faces; they held balloons that read, “Where are the women and minorities?” This mischief took place only a few years before the Guerrilla Girls wheat-pasted their first posters.
On a timeline, demonstrations for art world diversity appear to be more or less continuous from the late 1960s into the 1980s. But the Guerrilla Girls’ work seems to mark a break, to belong to a different era of activism. It wasn’t just that their posters were funnier and more stylish than their predecessors’. It was that they came up with a new persona for the art activist, a persona that captured the attention of a public weary of political demonstrations.
The Guerrilla Girls were not petitioners standing outside a building making demands. They had gotten inside. They were moles and whistleblowers, with a dash of the incognito gossip columnist. Though they gathered data for the first posters simply by counting exhibition listings, much as earlier protest groups had, their polished layouts and barbed questions suggested that some mysterious entity was speaking to the public from inside the art world, spilling its secrets. “THESE GALLERIES SHOW NO MORE THAN 10% WOMEN ARTISTS OR NONE AT ALL”—followed by a list of twenty prominent New York galleries. “ONLY 4 COMMERICAL GALLERIES IN NY SHOW BLACK WOMEN.* ONLY 1 SHOWS MORE THAN 1.**” Asterisks led to the names of less prominent New York galleries. “HOW MANY WOMEN HAD ONE-PERSON EXHIBITIONS AT NYC MUSEUMS LAST YEAR?” The answer was one. “WHEN RACISM & SEXISM ARE NO LONGER FASHIONABLE, WHAT WILL YOUR ART COLLECTION BE WORTH?”
Where was the voice coming from? On their posters they called themselves, with arch grandiosity, the “conscience of the art world.” But had they broken into the advertising-entertainment-industrial complex as well? Certainly they had seized its Futura Extra Bold Condensed typeface (a version of which Absolut Vodka had made especially prominent with an ad campaign that began in 1980) and its most prestigious comic forms. (The Advantages of Being a Woman Artist appeared three years after the debut of David Letterman’s Top Ten list.)
The Girls paid for the first posters out of pocket. The eye-catching use of black and white was born of financial necessity—color printing was expensive. They went out in the middle of the night and put the posters up on the walls, phone booths, mailboxes, and scaffolding of SoHo. The next morning they would come back in their civilian clothes to hear what passersby might say about their work. Sometimes people’s comments gave them ideas for new posters. They met every two or three weeks at one another’s apartments, with everyone bringing food and proposals for projects. They worked by consensus; many ideas were vetoed; meetings were freewheeling and contentious.
Accounts vary as to how exactly they arrived at the idea of wearing gorilla masks, but all agree it was a case of homophone confusion. According to one version, a member suggested they wear guerrilla masks to protect their identities. She was picturing knit balaclavas, but another member misunderstood and bought the rubber-and-fur disguises that became their trademark. All their public appearances over the decades, including recent panel discussions at the Getty with Roxane Gay and Nadya Tolokonnikova, have been conducted in gorilla masks.
For a nom de guerre, each took the name of a dead female artist or writer. At first their anonymity was simply meant to protect their own work. “The art world was such a small, kind of clubby little place that the minute you got labeled as a complainer or a whiner, that was sort of the end of your career,” explained a founding member, “Frida Kahlo,” at one of her talks at the Getty. But surely part of the Guerrilla Girls’ appeal was that they were concealed. The women’s liberation movement had been a spectacle of marching and chanting women, bodies amassed in the streets. Feminist art was associated with sculptural representations of the vulva. By the 1980s all of that was passé.
The Guerrilla Girls instead presented a feminist protest that was at first completely disembodied: a set of posters appearing by unknown means, citing statistics—cerebral, fact-based, ironic, with feelings and genitals only distantly implied. Even when members came forward for interviews, their masks spared the audience the sight of their faces and hair: no one would be too vividly reminded of their dislike of women. In the Reagan era, these may have been the best possible tactics for winning sympathy and support for a feminist cause.
Some of the Guerrilla Girls were already successful as artists when they began their activism; others had received little attention. At a certain point the group started listing an address on some of their flyers, and soon their PO box at Cooper Station flooded with fan mail, small donations, and requests to join up. Membership was by invitation only in order to protect their anonymity, but nonetheless their numbers grew; they were also writers, art teachers, secretaries in museums and galleries. The original members, who were white, recruited women of color, though the group has never published statistics about its racial makeup.
Despite the prevailing atmosphere of conservative backlash, the feminist activists quickly became sought-after speakers and talk show guests, with invitations from around the world. It was much more attention than they had expected—they were “shocked,” it was “overwhelming,” “it’s like we were rock stars,” one of them later said.
Their portfolio expanded to include paid bus ads, billboards, and a mock newspaper called Hot Flashes, funded by lecture fees and individual donations. They added statistics on how many women and nonwhite artists were reviewed in newspapers and magazines. They offered sly commentary on corporate reputation washing and museum boards’ conflicts of interest, most notably in the form of a tongue-in-cheek, Ten Commandments–style Code of Ethics for Art Museums.
Their campaigns asked little from the public. They didn’t need you to join a march or boycott. You only had to be a witness to the embarrassment of the art establishment, which the posters’ wit and clean graphics made more of a pleasure than a duty. They didn’t post data on women working as curators or gallerists or critics, apparently not caring to track the diversity of the art world apart from artists themselves, whom they implicitly positioned as folk heroes fighting a dubious set of arbiters and middlemen. In fact, at least some of the Girls were disenchanted with the women who did have positions of power in that world. Kahlo later described the art scene of the Eighties as one of “white male artists helped by white females” who curated and sold their work.
The Eighties revival of figurative painting made superstars out of a gaggle of male artists such as Julian Schnabel, David Salle, and Keith Haring. The star system was a familiar fact of the postwar art world, but in the Eighties the stars weren’t simply making a living from their art—they were getting rich. It seemed no accident to the Guerrilla Girls that female artists were being pushed aside precisely when there was a lot of money to be made. They embarrassed the art world by showing that, contrary to its self-conception, it was actually retrograde. “WOMEN IN AMERICA EARN ONLY 2/3 OF WHAT MEN DO. WOMEN ARTISTS EARN ONLY 1/3 OF WHAT MEN ARTISTS DO,” reads one poster.
Since the 1970s feminist scholars (some of whom were also Guerrilla Girls) had been bringing the insights and energies of the women’s liberation movement to bear on the study of art history. But while scholars elaborated, the Guerrilla Girls distilled. “Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum?” asked another of their best-known posters. The question hovers above an image of Ingres’s Grande Odalisque in a leering gorilla mask. Below it, two data points: “Less than 5% of the artists in the Modern Art sections are women, but 85% of the nudes are female.” Had anyone ever before so pithily encapsulated a complex set of social relations?
In the early 1990s they briefly experimented with political subjects outside the art establishment. “What’s the difference between a prisoner of war and a homeless person?” asks one poster that shows a grainy newspaper photo of a police officer prodding a man sleeping on a bench, beneath which is their answer: “Under the Geneva Convention, a prisoner of war is entitled to food, shelter and medical care.” A poster created during the first Gulf War lists neglected domestic policies, including “national health care” and “childcare and education for everyone,” overlayed with a stamp of “MISSING IN ACTION.” A placard for abortion rights reads, “GUERRILLA GIRLS DEMAND A RETURN TO TRADITIONAL VALUES ON ABORTION.” The fine print explains that “before the mid-19th century, abortion in the first few months of pregnancy was legal.” But these forays ended within a few years, perhaps because, as the Guerrilla Girl “Käthe Kollwitz” has said, they had never wanted merely “to speak to the converted,” which is all that their big-issue posters, despite their sharpness, were likely to do.
They found a more durable new subject in the movie industry. “Even the US Senate is more progressive than Hollywood,” read a Los Angeles billboard that they commissioned during the Oscars season of 2003, indicating that women constituted 14 percent of senators but only 4 percent of film directors (based on the one hundred top-grossing films of 2002). But was Hollywood embarrassable? Was anyone anymore?
The 1980s may have been a time of conservative resurgence, but the period of the late 1990s and the 2000s, the so-called postfeminist era, was the more challenging environment for the Guerrilla Girls’ activism. Disparities prevailed, but they were no longer news. SoHo had cleaned itself up, made pedestrians feel safe. Affixing posters to public and private property had always been illegal, but now the law was enforced with the approval of affluent property owners. “People were walking the neighborhood at all hours of the night,” the Guerrilla Girl “Zora Neale Hurston” recalls with regret—nothing could be done surreptitiously anymore. They gave up postering.
During the same years, group members struggled to find consensus on projects and priorities. The leaderless collective had no formal procedures for making decisions or resolving conflicts. In the early 2000s they split into three groups: the Guerrilla Girls, led by two of the founding members, Kahlo and Kollwitz; Guerrilla Girls BroadBand, which emphasized projects online; and Guerrilla Girls on Tour!, which concentrated their activism in the worlds of theater and the performing arts. The breakaway groups had mostly younger, newer members.
The split was not amicable, and in 2003 the original Guerrilla Girls sued the other two groups over trademark and copyright infringement. (Shortly before the split Kahlo and Kollwitz had legally incorporated the group, adding an unlovely suffix to the collective’s name: Guerrilla Girls Inc.) The suit was settled in 2005. Guerrilla Girls BroadBand has not been active in years, while Guerrilla Girls on Tour! still makes public appearances. The originals have been the ones behind the fortieth-anniversary exhibitions not only at the Getty but at the National Museum of Women in the Arts and at Bulgaria’s National Gallery.
The Getty exhibition, reticent about the split, presents the Girls’ work as a single continuous forty-year enterprise. But while the rooms tell us a great deal about the group’s first ten years, they say little about its last thirty. They give the impression, perhaps not inaccurate, that the Guerrilla Girls’ brilliant run ended by the late 1990s. Since then they’ve been living out a second life not so much as feminist activists but as beloved mascots for feminist activism. Perhaps the animal masks always portended it.
Did their work change the numbers? The first round of mea culpas came from art critics and magazine editors. Kahlo and Kollwitz recall personal apologies from the Artforum editor Ida Panicelli and the critic Thomas McEvilley; the New York Times critic Roberta Smith published an acknowledgment of the group’s mission. They all said that they had not realized how skewed their coverage was and vowed to do better. Curators, gallerists, and collectors privately blamed one another, which was at least a tacit acknowledgment of the problem.
The Guerrilla Girls have occasionally done follow-up posters that show at best only slight improvements. A 2015 version of How many women had one-person exhibitions at NYC museums last year? showed that in thirty years the number had risen from one to five. They revisited their Hollywood statistics in 2019 with a poster (released on social media) showing that between 1999 and 2019 the percentage of women in the Senate climbed from 9 percent to 25 percent, while the percentage of women directing top-grossing films stayed exactly the same at 4 percent.
Other institutions have taken over the keeping of statistics. On its website the National Museum of Women in the Arts provides up-to-date facts and sources showing that, in summary, both artists and art institutions are well short of gender parity. The Guerrilla Girls also inspired agitators in other fields to do their own counts. In 2011 the now defunct literary organization VIDA published a survey of bylines (as best it could determine them) in prestigious magazines and book reviews. It found that both book reviewers and authors under review skewed heavily male—in a milieu that, like the art world, prided itself on progressivism. This magazine had the worst ratio of male to female contributors: about 5.9 to 1. (In 2025 the ratio, looking at writers in print alone, was 1.5 to 1.) Since 2014 UCLA has published an annual Hollywood Diversity Report with statistics on race and gender in acting, writing, and directing in theatrical films. Over eleven years women and people of color have made modest gains while remaining underrepresented in all categories. For those intrigued by the horse race between US senators and Hollywood film directors, the Senate still has a wide lead: last year it was 26 percent female to Hollywood’s 10 percent (a significant decline from 15 percent in 2024).
The conscience of the art world has changed more quickly than its actual figures on employment and representation. These conditions have left the Guerrilla Girls in a strange suspended state. Their questions haven’t become obsolete, but they’ve been orphaned in a political landscape in which the left is skeptical of integrationist efforts in elite fields, the center is sour on identity politics, and the right is avowedly patriarchal and white supremacist.
They do continue to produce original work, however. Kahlo said at the Getty that one of their current projects is to highlight “the aestheticization of violence against women throughout art history.” To this end, they’ve created an original installation as part of the “How to Be a Guerrilla Girl” exhibition.
On the walls near the entrance, they’ve annotated reproductions of several paintings from the Getty’s permanent collection with speech bubbles. “I get my kicks spying on women,” says a river god trying to catch a glimpse of the naked goddess in Jean-François de Troy’s Diana and Her Nymphs Bathing (1722–1724). “If this creep was alive today he’d be hiding cameras in women’s bathrooms!” says a nymph who’s trying to cover his eyes to protect Diana. But does Diana need protection? As she points out in her own speech bubble, “That stalker picked the wrong prey. As Goddess of the Hunt, I can turn men into frightened animals.” Meanwhile, another nymph in the lower right corner of the painting offers, “The guy who painted us was a member of the Royal Academy in Paris, where men could draw heaps of naked females but the few women members were forbidden to draw even one naked male.”
No more laconic riddles: the Guerrilla Girls’ work has grown chatty. The shrewdness of the classic “Do women have to be naked…” poster was that it pointed to a relationship between material conditions and symbolic forms without hazarding to describe that relationship. This time the Girls have wandered into the thicket of cultural and historical interpretation, and they haven’t been able to resist the temptation of easy analogies. But whatever the future of feminist rhetoric might be, it will certainly involve reading against the grain of gendered expectations. Historically speaking, isn’t it men in Western culture who are, like Diana, shy of being seen? Haven’t men arrogated to themselves Diana’s powers to punish anyone who looks at them with desire or catches them in their vulnerability? Just listen to what the nymph on the right is telling us: they didn’t allow women to paint male nudes.
This brings to mind an incident from the annals of feminist art activism. In 1975 an exhibition called “The Year of the Woman,” with works by more than sixty artists, went up at the Bronx Museum of the Arts. At the time, the museum was housed in the rotunda of the Bronx County Courthouse. Near the end of the show’s run, the presiding justice of the appellate division of the New York State Supreme Court, which shared the building, requested that the exhibition be taken down. According to a New York Times article about the incident, Justice Owen McGivern had convened with the other judges, and they agreed that some of the paintings made them feel uncomfortable. They particularly objected to a portrait by Sylvia Sleigh, Double Image: Paul Rosano, which shows a man—young, slender, pale, with a head of voluminous dark hair—looking into a mirror so that both the front and the back of his unclothed body are visible. “We’re all in sympathy with the arts,” McGivern told the Times reporter, “but explicit male nudity in the corridor of a public courthouse is something else.”
English (US) · 