Analysis: The Guerrilla Girls

The Guerrilla Girls’ are a group of seven women formed in 1984 after an art exhibition hosted by the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, where it became clear to them that the art industry was gender biased with women artists not being acknowledged. Since then they have been devoted to fighting sexism and racism within the art world, their mission to bring gender and racial inequality within the arts into focus. They have done this by producing factual and humorous posters that comment on these issues and that challenge and confront society to realise the injustice.

The Guerrilla Girls’ played a critical part in the feminist art movement in the United States that started in the 1970s. Alongside feminine artist like Barbara Kruger and Jenny

Much like Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer, the Guerrilla Girls used straight forward slogans and refined graphics to address the issue of inequity faced by women artists.

Women in America Earn only 2/3 of What Men Do. Women Artists Earn only 1/3 of What Men Do, 1985 (Figure 1) was first published in 1985 and later became one of Guerrilla Girls’ most well-known artworks. The poster depicts an ordinary one dollar bill with a black dotted line running down the two-thirds mark of the bill along with the caption underneath reading: ‘WOMEN IN AMERICA EARN ONLY 2/3 OF WHAT MEN DO. WOMEN ARTISTS EARN ONLY 1/3 OF WHAT MEN DO’. The dotted line is arranged to represent the amount women are paid compared to men. That for every dollar a man makes, women will only ever make two-thirds of that dollar. This is done to enhance the affect the meaning has by visually show the unfairness and sexual discrimination posed to women in the workplace. This poster is refined in its imagery and text, but gets straight to the point, much like most feminist artworks at the time. The message the Guerrilla Girls’ wanting to get across is clear; not only

Museum? 1989 (Figure 4) was first projected onto billboards in the late 1980’s and is the Guerrilla Girls’ most well-known and iconic artwork due to its nature and the publicity it received. Early into the organisation, the Guerrilla Girls started conducting ‘weenie counts’ which consisted of members going to art institutions and counting the male to female ration in artworks. This piece is an example of the sort of data collected from theses inspections. Do Women Have To Be Naked To Get Into the Met. Museum? presents the data gathered from a ‘weenie count’ conducted at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Met.). The data showed that less than 5% of the artworks were made by females artists, while over 85% of the nudes were females. The Guerrilla Girls’ are clearly showing the role women play in the art industry, that being that women are strongly objectified in the art world. Women are only acknowledge in the industry when they are used as objects for men. This artwork exposes this truth about the objectification women face in the art community. To emphasis their message, the Guerrilla Girls’ provided evidence of this objectification through appropriation art. By featuring artist Jean Ingres’s well-known reclining woman from his artwork ‘Grande Odalisque’ (Figure 5), the Guerrilla Girls’ played with preponderant imagistic and textual conventions to mash up the meaning of Jean Ingres’s work to create a new meaning and message for