Visiting Artist Lecture: Guerilla Girls

The Guerrilla Girls have been working to expose gender and racial discrimination in the art world—particularly in New York—and in the wider cultural arena since the 1980s. They formed in response to the 1984 MoMA exhibition titled International Survey of Painting and Sculpture, which included the work of 169 artists, only 13 of whom were women—less than 10%. The Guerrilla Girls dubbed themselves the “conscience of the art world,” and in 1985 they began a poster campaign that targeted museums, dealers, curators, critics, and artists whom they felt were responsible for the exclusion of women and non-white artists from mainstream exhibitions.

The Guerrilla Girls have exhibited widely across the world. In 2005 they created a large-scale installation for the Venice Biennale, and they have been the focus of two major recent exhibitions: one in Chicago in 2012, and another at the Guggenheim in Bilbao the following year. Their work is held in the collections of several institutions that they have critiqued over the years, including MoMA and the Walker, in addition to the Tate, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Getty Institute.