A Guerrilla Girl on Winning and Losing

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Kathe Kollwitz and Frida Kahlo on official business

© Guerrilla Girls, from www.guerrillagirls.com

A coaster designed by the Guerrilla Girls

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Since forming in 1985, the Guerrilla Girls, who assume the names of dead female artists as pseudonyms and will not reveal their real names or even how many of them there are, have sought to “expose sexism and racism in politics, the art world, film, and the culture at large.” Their outrageously wrought and humorous posters, billboards, stickers, and actions have called to attention, for example, the disparities between how the work of white, male artists is received and how everyone else’s is, in terms of critical recognition, auction prices, and inclusion in U.S. museums. In 1999, they created a poster that “exposed the lack of ethics” at the Brooklyn Museum after the museum failed to list Charles Saatchi as the sponsor of an exhibition of works from his collection.

ARTINFO talked with “Frida Kahlo” about remaining tough on the Brooklyn Museum, the challenges of keeping an edge, and sending Michael Kimmelman a year’s supply of Midol.

The Guerrila Girls started more than 20 years ago. How have your activities or motives changed since then?

When we started, the discrimination was pretty blatant: You didn’t see women artists in museum exhibitions, you never read about them in textbooks. Now there are other subtle forms of discrimination that have popped up. The first, of course, is tokenism, the idea that if a museum shows one women artist or one artist of color, somehow the problem is taken care of.

There’s also a lot of economic discrimination against women and artists of color in the art world. Women artists don’t get the kind of money that men do. And you need money to make more art. Look at the auctions. There was an article in the New York Times not too long ago that traced parallel careers of two British artists—they went to the same schools, won the same prizes, had the same museum shows, had the same collectors—and the guy’s work sold for probably 20 times what the woman’s work sold for.

Who were the artists?

You know, we try not to talk about that. We don’t want to be in a position of denigrating anybody’s career or even commenting on it.

But it was pretty shocking, because it’s not the 67 cents to the dollar that you find in the world of professionals. It was like five cents to the dollar.

Why do you think that is? It’s not like someone’s sitting down and deciding to offer women artists a lower salary.

Some discrimination is conscious and some is unconscious. This is probably unconscious. The world is not willing to call a woman artist a genius often enough to put a lot of money behind her. And we’re going into the auction season right now, so let’s just see.

What are your other targets these days?

We did a project for the Washington Post last spring, our own kind of scandal rag called the Not OK Weekly. We examined museums on the Mall, museums that are run by our tax dollars, and found that the art in the museums doesn’t really represent who we are as a culture. At the time the National Gallery had not one single artwork by an African-American artist. And when the Washington Post called to fact check, the museum said, “Call us back tomorrow, we’re going to double-check with the curatorial departments.” And all of a sudden they decided, overnight, to reinstall a sculpture by an African-American sculptor, as though one is better than none.

Afterward, we had a secret meeting with a secret organization of National Gallery curators, and we were told that when they got the call from the Washington Post, they were all told to drop everything and count.

So the arts organizations you criticize are on your side?

When we started out 20 years ago we were operating in an atmosphere of disbelief. A lot of people in the institutions opposed us, because it was hard to admit how bad things really were. Now those same institutions are embracing us. It’s a dilemma for us how to keep an edge.