Guerrilla Girls | Raw and Radical Women in the Arts

The Guerilla Girls share their take on sexism, racism, and corruption in the art world, and how they fight back with “creative complaining” It was a great honor to welcome two of the Guerrilla Girls, “Frida Kahlo” and “Käthe Kollwitz,” to this episode of the Raw and Radical Women in the Arts podcast. The Guerilla Girls group is made up of anonymous feminist activist artists, who wear gorilla masks and adopt the names of famous women artists as pseudonyms so that public attention remains on the work they do, rather than on their identities. Beginning of the Guerrilla Girls The group formed in 1985, after a 1984 MOMA exhibition included just 13 women and 8 artists of color in their line up of 169 artists. “We realised … we had to do something, and a bunch of women, not us, called a protest,” says Käthe. “It had no effect at all. And we understood at that moment that people thought the art world was a meritocracy … where the gatekeepers, the powers that be, always picked the best. So if you weren’t in a museum, you sucked, you weren’t any good, and that was our ‘ah ha’ moment. We realized there had to be a better way to tell people about this issue, a way that broke through their preconceived notions: Since then, the Guerrilla Girls have engaged in what they call “creative complaining,” to raise awareness and catalyze change. Their new book, Guerrilla Girls: The Art of Behaving Badly, documents the hundreds of projects they have done over the last 35 years to expose sexism, racism, and corruptions. “Our idea from the beginning was to create a new kind of political art using strategies of persuasion, like advertising,” says Käthe. “We do books, we do videos, we do huge billboards, but it’s all based on that kind of graphic execution and we started out doing street posters and bringing our work directly to people.” For more information on our guests and this episode, visit the website of raw and radical. This podcast is supported by the Swiss arts council prohelvetia and the City of Lancy, Switzerland