The Guerrilla Girls Project Essay

The Guerilla Girls

Sunday, February 26th, 2017
9:06am

Victor Moya, Kristie Perez, and Monica Sarmiento

              The Guerilla Girls are an inspiring, motivating, and strong group of collective artists that use their artistic skills in order to convey their rage for gender inequality, racism, and social injustice. Established in 1985, they began their movement one night by placing posters all throughout Soho in downtown Manhattan which were signed “the conscience of the art world”. The posters were set to depict the lack of women’s art work displayed in museums although, the majority of paintings consist of nude women.

The anonymous group of women began to attract a significant amount of followers who requested interviews and to know their identities. Using gorilla masks to hide their identity, the women agreed to interviews and being photographed but chose to keep their identities hidden in order to protect their careers. In addition to protecting their careers, what was most important to them was to empower their movement without creating a focus on their personalities.

They have been featured on many magazines and papers such as Vogue, the New York Times, and many more. The Guerrilla Girls have used posters, videos, discussions, and their website to share their artwork and movement. Their work has established such an empowering disruption to the art world that they have been featured on CBS’s Nightwatch, PBS’s The Eleventh Hour, CNN’s Gender Wars, and the majority of radio stations and television shows in Europe. Their goal to empower women, create social awareness, and make feminism fashionable again has been spreading throughout the world for several decades.

            For three decades, the Guerrilla Girls have spoke out and fought diligently against the patriarchy that dominates the entire art world. On The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Frida Kahlo explained, “... the art will never look like the whole of our culture,” as long as the art world is run by rich, straight white men. The intersectional feminism that runs through the veins of the Guerrilla Girls is important to note because they are not only fighting for the inclusion of white female artists, but for the inclusion of queer, disabled, and women of color.

           Outside of the art world, the Guerrilla Girls have other interests close to their hearts. They were actively opposed to the Gulf War and President Bush’s education policy. In 1991 they also worked with N.Y.C's Women's Shelter and The Artist & Homeless to make a poster campaign about the issue of women’s homelessness in the city.