CVA Lecture Series: Guerrilla Girls

For 40 years, the Guerrilla Girls are anonymous artist activists who use disruptive headlines, outrageous visuals and killer statistics to expose gender and ethnic bias and corruption in art, film, politics and pop culture. They believe in an intersectional feminism that fights for human rights for all people of all genders. They work to undermine the idea of a mainstream narrative by revealing the understory, the subtext, the overlooked, and the unfair. The Guerrilla Girls have done hundreds of projects (street posters, banners, actions, books, and videos) all over the world. As well, they produce interventions and exhibitions at art museums, blasting institutions on their own walls for bad behavior and discriminatory practices, including a stealth projection on the façade of the Whitney Museum about income inequality and the super-rich hijacking art. Guerrilla Girls retrospectives, traveling exhibitions and interventions have attracted thousands at Tate Modern and Whitechapel Gallery, London; São Paulo Museum of Art; the Venice Biennale; Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam; Museum of Military History, Dresden; Art Basel Hong Kong; The Getty Center and many other places. Their latest book, Guerrilla Girls: The Art of Behaving Badly collects hundreds of their projects from 1985 to 2020, and was named one of the best art books of 2020 by The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times. The Guerrilla Girls’ motto: Do one thing. If it works, do another. If it doesn’t, do another anyway. Keep chipping away!