One of the many anonymous members of the Guerrilla Girls spoke at the University of Chicago concerning the lack of female involvement in both museums as well as current media. Known for their provocative methods of getting out their message including mixed media posters, billboard ads, and slogans (including the one found on their website: “Re-inventing the “f” word – feminism”), when in public the group always wear gorilla masks to conceal their identity. As the speaker noted, “It’s the work that we do, it doesn’t really matter who the people are.”
Established in New York City in 1985, the Guerrilla Girls first became known for their flashy posters that decorated the streets of the city. First focusing on statistics of museums in the area (usually specifically percentages of artists who were male and/or white), they eventually moved on to analyze problems of underrepresentation of women and other ethnicities within the film industry and gender stereotyping. Stylistically common in all of their work is a flashy commercialized front meant to draw the viewer in, so that they’ll pay attention to the statistics listed on their work. Considering the establishments that they target, I was quite surprised. For example, the National Gallery of Art has artists that are 98% male and 99.9% white. Although when one thinks about the older collections, considering social norms and constraints at the time, it would make sense that the best-preserved paintings would be those of white males.
The speaker started her talk discussing what the group was doing to move forward now that they were well known and considered to be “main stream” in some eyes. Other audience members expressed concern that they had “sold out,” as if the Guerrilla Girls were a small indie band that had signed onto a large record label and were being used in commercials. Despite their notoriety and their current popularity, isn’t it their purpose to get their word out to as many people as possible, and doesn’t this popularity help their message rather than hurt it?
Throughout the discussion, the speaker went through the evolution of their movement, ending on their interests in forwarding feminist ideals. The speaker noted “everyone wants to believe that Feminism is over, that we’ve somehow won,” and how they strive as a group to continue to bring feminist ideals to the public without the negative stigma that being a “feminist” usually has. An audience member aptly noted that the Guerrilla Girls only had female or transgender members, but no male members, and that a large part of the most recent wave of feminism was to include men as well. The speaker accepted this, but also said that this was just because it was the way things “had always been.” It seems strange that the Guerrilla Girls would push the boundaries in so many ways, yet not be able to push the boundaries within their own organization.
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