Shared History of the Guerrilla Girls
In 1985, a bunch of female artists founded the Guerrilla Girls because they were incensed by an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art that included 165 artists but only 17 women. As a result, they formed an art activist collective called The Guerrilla Girls and dubbed themselves "The Conscience of the Art World.” The Guerrilla Girls started making posters that called out acts and evidence of discrimination in it. The group used humor and facts in order to raise awareness about injustices and biases, provoke discussion, and make calls to actions. Humor, while cathartic, also helped the group combat the angry feminist stereotype, by showing feminists can, in fact, be funny.
However, in the 80s calling out the patriarchy in the art world was not always appreciated and many of the Girls feared professional retribution. As a result, the group assumed the names of dead women artists and began wearing gorilla masks when they appeared in public, concealing members’ true identities. This also helped viewers focus on the issues at hand and discover under-recognized dead women artists as opposed to the personalities in the group. Between 1985 and 2000, close to 100 women, working collectively and anonymously, produced posters, billboards, public actions, books and other projects.
Origin Story of The Guerrilla Girls BroadBand
On January 24, 2001, a few intrepid broads from the Guerrilla Girls set out to uniquely fight for truth, justice, and the feminist way and formed The Guerrilla Girls BroadBand (GGBB). Like the other sister wings – Guerrilla Girls, Inc. and Guerrilla Girls on Tour, GGBB also donned gorilla masks and fought for social and art justice. Coming out of the Dotcom boom though, GGBB wanted to embrace new technologies and the Internet as a relatively untapped platform for social activism and public engagement. They did this with their inaugural project Letters to Bad Bosses. It got a write-up in the New York Times that sent 900,000 visitors to their founding website.
GGBB also formed because its founders cared about equitable practices in art collectives. The original Unincorporated Collective of Guerrilla Girls had come unstuck partly through a lack of agreed procedures for such things as diversity, power-sharing, and collective rights to intellectual property. (To read more about this, please read the 2011 Art Journal article Guerrilla Girls and Guerrilla Girls Broadband: Inside Story.) GGBB believed that if you were going to fight for justice and equality, then the group had to practice what they preached too. To fix these problems, GGBB wrote a group constitution, which blazed an egalitarian trail for future collective artistic endeavors.
GGBB maintains an online presence where visitors can download posters and projects for their own activism and conscious raising; and they continue to pound the pavement with street posters and performance activism. As the group has developed since the early 2000s, GGBB decided it needed to share its decades of art and activism knowledge with the next generation of feminists and embrace fourth-wave intersectionalism. After lending a hand to help Emma Sulkowicz Carry That Weight, GGBB designed GGBB Campus to continue addressing sexual assault on U.S. campuses. In the anti-rape poster-making workshop, the Broads help students find their voices, hone their messages, and create works of art with the intent of helping change the culture of rape on campus.
GGBB started because it had avant-garde feminist ideas. It wanted to establish healthier group power-sharing strategies. It recognized the importance of diversity, inclusion, and collaboration. It wanted to fight for equality beyond the art world. It foresaw the future influence of technology and hactivism. Almost twenty-years later, the Broads are still working in the name of feminism and for the sake of equality. If you’d like to hear more about how they are working to “Provoke, Protest, and Prevail” or would like to collaborate or make them aware of an issue, please feel free to reach out to them here.