Knowra Guerrilla Girls Guerrilla Girls The Guerrilla Girls are an anonymous feminist artist collective founded in 1985. They use posters, performances, and other interventions to expose sexism and racism in the art world.
Do Women Have to Be Naked to Get into the Met. Museum? : A 1989 Guerrilla Girls poster comparing nude female figures in the Metropolitan Museum of Art with women artists in its modern-art collection. Its striking statistic and gorilla-mask figure show how the collective makes institutional exclusion visible.
1984 An International Survey of Painting and Sculpture : A 1984 exhibition at New York's Museum of Modern Art featuring 165 artists, only 13 of whom were women. The exhibition's imbalance helped prompt the protests from which the Guerrilla Girls formed.
Frida Kahlo : A Mexican painter known for self-portraits that draw on personal experience, Mexican culture, and physical suffering. She is one of the historical women artists the collective has invoked against their exclusion from art histories.
Museum gender gap : The unequal representation of women and men in museum collections, exhibitions, and institutional leadership. Their campaigns use collection and exhibition disparities as evidence of structural exclusion.
Feminist art criticism : Art criticism that examines how gender shapes artistic production, interpretation, and recognition. The collective's campaigns turn feminist criticism into concise public arguments about institutions.
Guerrilla communication : A form of public communication that uses unconventional, low-cost tactics to challenge dominant messages. The collective adapts these tactics to reach audiences beyond museums and galleries.
Art Workers' Coalition : A New York organization of artists and cultural workers that protested museum policies and political issues from 1969. Its model of organizing artists against museum power preceded the collective's direct institutional protests.
Käthe Kollwitz : A German artist whose prints and sculptures depicted poverty, war, and working-class life. The collective has adopted her name as one of its pseudonyms.
Art market : The network of buyers, sellers, galleries, auction houses, and institutions through which art is valued and exchanged. The collective's challenges extend from museum display to the market's unequal recognition and valuation.
Representation in art : The depiction and visibility of people, identities, and social groups in artworks and art institutions. Their work connects who makes art with who appears in collections and exhibitions.
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