Forty years of the Guerrilla Girls at the Getty Research Center

How to be a Guerrilla Girl retraces the history of the iconic feminist collective, born in NYC in 1985. On view until April 12th, 2026

Thirteen out of 169. Thirteen women out of 169 artists were included in An International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture, the exhibition held at MoMA in 1984. Confronted with criticism, curator Kynaston McShine infamously remarked that “any artist who wasn’t in the show should rethink his career”.

The following year, in response to yet another blatant demonstration of structural misogyny in the art world, an anonymous feminist collective emerged. The Guerrilla Girls were born out of frustration, rage, and clarity of purpose, exposing the mechanisms through which the system consistently marginalized women artists and artists of colour.

THE GUERRILLA GIRLS’ DEFINING PRINCIPLES

Marking forty years of activism, the exhibition curated by Zanna Gilbert and Kristin Juarez at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles draws extensively from the Guerrilla Girls archive held at the Research Institute. Posters, mass mailings, and form letters document the collective’s first two decades, while also revealing more intimate dimensions of their militancy: emotional conflicts, internal correspondence, fan letters. The Guerrilla Girls operate as a non-hierarchical, self-managed, and often clandestine collective. As they famously declare, “We’re the conscience of the art world, counterparts to the mostly male traditions of anonymous do-gooders like Robin Hood, Batman, and the Lone Ranger. […] We could be anyone; we are everywhere” (from The Guerrilla Girls’ Bedside Companion to the History of Western Art, 1998).

These principles continue to define their practice today. Anonymity, meticulous data gathering, protest actions, culture jamming, and grassroots distribution remain central to their strategy. “We also do interventions and exhibitions at art museums”, they state, “blasting them on their own walls for their bad behavior and discriminatory practices”.

AN EXHIBITION IN FIVE SECTIONS

Organized into five sections, the exhibition brings together some of the collective’s most iconic works and manifestos, retracing the performative dimension of their activism. From the seminal Do Women Have to Be Naked to Get Into the Met. Museum? poster – first conceived as a bus advertisement and here shown through early drafts alongside updated versions – to the Dearest Art Collector series, signed with a brazen “xoxo” and a lipstick kiss, the show foregrounds irony as a political weapon.

Arguably their most famous work, Advantages of Being a Woman Artist, occupies a central position in the first section. It is presented alongside archival documents that trace the collaborative process behind its making, including evidence of an early, abandoned idea: a two-part version addressing men and women artists separately.

THE KEY ELEMENTS OF THE GUERRILLA GIRLS’ LANGUAGE

Photographs, sketches, photoshoot materials, videotapes, and audio recordings further testify to the multifaceted universe of these masked figures. Sarcastic, unapologetic, and relentlessly incisive, the Guerrilla Girls have become firmly embedded in popular culture, adopting a language that fuses blunt communication with uncomfortable truths: as they stated in Interview Magazine “artists should stop making art only for the one percent and start making some art for the rest of us”.