Guerrilla Girls

Sometimes artists themselves question the museum with their artwork, and we call this institutional critique.

One master of this craft is the feminist art collective the Guerrilla Girls, who in 1989 visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and compared the number of works by women artists in the gallery to the number of nude female bodies on display.

They found that less than 5% of the artists in the modern art gallery were women, compared to 85% of the nudes.

In response to this unbalanced representation, they launched an ad campaign that called attention to their findings.

And you might be amused to know that not only is one of those original posters now a part of the Met's collection, but today the Guerrilla Girls are actively invited to museums around the world to shine a light on new injustices.

Despite the complicated history behind museums, they continue to do important work.

Museums are wonderful places to see and appreciate a huge range of art and objects.

You'd get a different kind of censorship, and I'd actually be interested to know, which I will never know, how many songs of the ill people have, have created and have not been able to release and what, what the point of censorship would be in, in, in 2026.

Shall we do the other, other things in the legacy, like the Guerrilla Girls?

Yeah, yeah.

So the Guerrilla Girls can be thought of as, um, a feminist art collective détourning art history's canon in a way i- in itself So, so they were founded in 1985 in direct response to, to a specific event, and that was the Museum of Modern Art in New York's, uh, what, what was called the International Survey of Painting and Sculpture.

There were, like, 169 artists, uh, involved, and only 13 of them were, were women, right? And so that statistic becomes kind of the central grievance that they are, that they are reacting against.

So what it looks like is the members stay anonymous, and they wear gorilla masks in public, and they've got, like, pseudonyms of, of dead women artists like Frida Kahlo and Kollwitz, et cetera.

The way they talk about themselves is with this, like, tagline, "This is a public service message from the Guerrilla Girls, the conscience of the art world." And it's, they combine hard statistics with, uh, deadpan humor, and I think, I think it still really works.

I think the most famous poster which, uh, I'd like to bring up, and maybe we could put a link, uh, in the show notes, is this one of, like, do women have to be naked to get into the Met Museum? And basically, with that statistic of less than 5% of artists in the modern art sections are women, but 85% of the nudes are, are women.