The Guerilla Girls are masked art activists who seek to bring attention to women in the art world and expose the unfair dominance of white males in the field. Their research into the racial and gender inequality in the art world is exposed through ironically worded public posters and billboards.
National Museum of Women In the Arts:
To maintain their anonymity, group members wear gorilla masks in public and adopt the names of historic women artists, such as Käthe Kollwitz and Frida Kahlo, as pseudonyms.
The Guerrilla Girls tactic was well thought-out and was effective in creating a spectacle to draw attention to the issue at hand, which is the lack of female representation in the museum. Where I think the campaign has some drawbacks is in the actual message on the billboard. The rhetorical and ironic message is subtle and really only reaches those who are privy to the art world and/ or the museum.
They call themselves feminist masked avengers in the tradition of Robin Hood, Wonder Woman and Batman. They wear costume gorilla masks to remain anonymous, and they are devoted to fighting sexism and racism within the visual art world internationally.
In 1984, a group of women in New York gathered outside the Museum of Modern Art as part of a protest. A group show, An International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture, was showing 165 artists, 152 male artists exhibited alongside just 13 women.
Outraged, they attended the protest, bringing placards and chanting outside the museum. But a handful of women within the larger crowd learned something.