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Artwork and Commentary
The Guerrilla Girls
Do Women Have to Be Naked to Get into the Met. Museum?
When the Public Art Fund of New York asked us to design a billboard, we conducted a “weenie count” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, comparing the number of nude males to nude females, and the number of male versus female artists in the artworks on display. The results were very “revealing.” The PAF turned down our proposal for the project, stating it was “unclear.” What was clear to us was that they were unwilling to publicly criticize a major New York museum. So we rented ad space on city buses and sent this now iconic work around New York. It’s become our most popular poster.
Figure 19.1. Poster: Do Women Have to Be Naked to Get into the Met. Museum?, 1989. Copyright © Guerrilla Girls, courtesy www.guerrillagirls.com.
Billionaires Hijacking Art/Income Inequality, 2015
The huge earnings gap between the super-rich and everyone else is one of the biggest scourges facing our planet. Everything that’s wrong with the world economy is wrong with the economy of the art world. We can’t let billionaires control art—or politics, for that matter. Our new series of stickers calls out the corrupt system that art collectors, galleries, and museums perpetuate.
Figure 19.2. Stickers outside New York museums. Copyright © Guerrilla Girls, courtesy www.guerrillagirls.com.
The Birth of Feminism Movie Poster, Rotterdam, 2007
Hollywood producers have come to us over the years, saying they want to make a movie about the history of feminism in the United States. We tell them our ideas and then never hear from them again. One day, we started wondering what a Hollywood film about feminist history would be like. So, we decided to make our own satirical movie poster of the film we hope NEVER gets made the Hollywood way.
Figure 19.3. Poster: The Birth of Feminism, Witte de With façade. Copyright © Guerrilla Girls, courtesy www.guerrillagirls.com.
The Anatomically Correct Oscar, 2002
We decided it was time for a little realism in Hollywood, so we rented a billboard near the Oscar ceremony in Los Angeles, and for the month of March 2002, presented The Anatomically Correct Oscar. We redesigned the golden boy to look more like the white guys who take him home each year. And guess what: at the Academy Awards on March 25, Halle Berry became the first ever African American woman to win Best Actress, and Denzel Washington the second ever African American man to win Best Actor. We were jazzed by that, but the film industry still has a long way to go.
Figure 19.4. Image of billboard in Hollywood. Copyright © Guerrilla Girls, courtesy www.guerrillagirls.com.
Do Women Have to be Naked to Get into Music Videos, 2014
When Pharrell Williams asked us to be in an exhibition called “G I R L” at Galerie Perrotin Paris, we said okay, but only if we could show two new posters: one about women in music and another about women artists at Perrotin. After watching lots of videos, we had a question for Pharrell: Why do women have to be naked to get into music videos while 99% of the guys are dressed? We did a remix of one of our classic posters with a still from Williams’s and Robin Thicke’s notorious Blurred Lines music video.
