Guerilla Girls - The Art of Behaving Badly

In the organizer's words:

In 1984, the exhibition "An International Survey of Painting and Sculpture" opened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which claimed to bring together the most important contemporary positions in the world. Only 13 women were among the 169 selected positions. Furthermore, all of the exhibitors were white and came from the USA or Europe. Against this backdrop, a group of female activists formed to denounce the serious, structural inequality of women and people of color in the art world: the Guerrilla Girls.

The Guerrilla Girls counted how many solo exhibitions of women there were in the major museums in the USA, how many female artists hung in commercial galleries and what they earned. They disseminated the sobering results on now world-famous posters and flyers. On their most iconic poster, for example, they asked whether women had to be naked to enter the Met Museum, as only 5% of the works on display were by women artists, but 85% of the nudes were by women.

As the "conscience of the art world", they have been revealing the mechanisms of exclusion and the underrepresentation of women and people of colour in the art and cultural landscape, which likes to stylize itself as diverse, enlightened and progressive, for 40 years now. The art of the Guerrilla Girls does not stop at Hollywood, pop culture or politics. In order to maintain their anonymity and be able to act freely, the members wear gorilla masks in public and act under the pseudonyms of historical artists such as Frida Kahlo or Shigeko Kubota.

In a special exhibition, over 30 posters and films provide an overview of their work, which is still incomparable today.

The exhibition is the first in a series of anniversary exhibitions celebrating the 40th anniversary of the frauen museum wiesbaden. On November 3, 2024, the museum will officially celebrate its birthday with an exhibition on its history!

Supported with funds from the state of Hesse and SV SparkassenVersicherung.