Guerrilla Girls

2020-2021 Elizabeth M. Marion Visiting Artist

The Guerrilla Girls are a feminist, activist artist collective committed to fighting injustice in the arts. They wear signature gorilla masks in public and take on the names of dead women artists to remain anonymous. Founded in New York City in 1985, they began by flyposting text and photo-based messages on the streets of SoHo to call attention to discriminatory practices by galleries and museums towards women. Today, they use stickers, flyers, and advertising campaigns full of facts, humor, and outrageous visuals to expose bias and corruption in politics, art, film, and pop culture. They create works of art that reveal the understory, the subtext, the overlooked, and the downright unfair. The Guerrilla Girls believe in an intersectional feminism that fights discrimination and supports human rights for all people and all genders.

An exhibition of their works in McMaster Gallery, Guerrilla Girls: Art, Power, and Justice for All!, explores text and photo-based activist works that use statistics and humor to shock and reveal underlying issues of power and representation in the arts, and chronicle the Guerrilla Girls’ history of institutional critique in the field of contemporary art.

This program is part of the Justice Theme Semester in the College of Arts and Sciences. Support comes from a grant from the Knight Foundation fund at the Central Carolina Community Foundation, the College of Arts and Sciences at UofSC, and the Elizabeth M. Marion Visiting Artist Fund at the School of Visual Art and Design, and the Columbia Museum of Art.

Exhibition: Guerrilla Girls: Art, Power, and Justice for All!, October 1 - October 22, 2020, McMaster Gallery.

A Virtual Evening with the Guerrilla Girls: October 9, 7:00 pm.

Watch live on Facebook: facebook.com/columbiamuseum

Virtual Activist Art Workshop with the Guerrilla Girls: October 10, 12:00 pm, Zoom.