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"Making point blank demands won't necessarily change a thing . . . Making demands are the tactics of the 70s and let's face it, they didn't really work very well. So we decided to try another way: humor, irony, intimidation, and poking fun."
—Louise "The Poster Girl" 1
In the spring of 1985, a series of black-and-white posters mysteriously appeared in Manhattan's East Village and SoHo. Wheatpasted in the middle of the night, these posters manifested as purposely unavoidable presences for the artists, curators, and other art world professionals who lived and worked in these neighbourhoods, home also to many of New York's major galleries and museums. Their arrival followed on the heels of the Museum of Modern Art's 1984 "International Survey of Contemporary Painting and Sculpture," an exhibition meant to demonstrate the museum's commitment to the work of living artists. The show's curator, Kynaston McShine, had reportedly declared that any artist not in the show should rethink his career. 2 Of the approximately 166 artists shown, only 15 were women. 3
The posters served as explicit commentary on the myopia of McShine's curation. Relying on statistics culled from venerable art publications, galleries, and museums, the posters wielded numbers to bluntly point out the extent of discrimination against women artists. Beyond numbers, the posters called out complicit artists, gallery owners, curators, and critics. The Guerilla Girls' first poster, listing the names of forty-two prominent male artists, asked, "What do these artists have in Common?" The answer? "They all allow their work to be shown in galleries that show no more than 10% women artists or none at all." The poster unmistakably held esteemed artists themselves responsible for this inequality. Other posters that followed called out certain galleries for "showing no more than 10% women artists or none at all" as well as critics who "don't write enough about women artists." At the bottom of each poster, in smaller yet unmistakable bold font, these posters referenced themselves as "Public Service Announcements" from the art world's new "cultural conscience." They were only the beginning. 4
These posters were the work of the Guerrilla Girls, a collective of artists and art world professionals united in their anger and frustration at the art world's exclusionary practices and system of...