The naked billboard that shocked the establishment – and blazed a trail in the art world

40 years have passed since the controversial Guerrilla Girls activist group formed. His most powerful campaign, the “naked poster,” broke a new land, and has had a lasting influence.

On Sunday morning in New York in 1989, some women examined the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Art Museum. Hidden among the regular traigators, the anonymous collective of feminist art, the Girls guerrillas, went unnoticed, since they were careful the number of female artists versus the number of naked women represented in the works of art. They were in a secret mission to make people care about the racial and gender injustice of the art world.

“The idea was always to find that unforgettable nucleus,” he tells the BBC of the National Museum of Women in the Arts, one of the founding members of Guerrillas, who uses Alias ​​Käthe Kollwitz, in the National Museum of Women of the Arts.

They made their way through the different rooms, fit the male nudes of ancient Greece and the almost absence of nudity in the first Christian sections, but that was when they reached the early modern era that bit the static experiments of art Gorthaticsatmsati who raised the question of who were allowed to be subject and objects in the smallest corridors of the most prestigious art institutions in the world.

“Less than 5% of artists in modern art sections are women, but 85% of the nudes are women,” says the poster, next to a female nude whose head is covered by the gorilla mask characteristic of the group. The figure is based on the painting the great Odalisque, 1814, by the male painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ing.

To this day, the group is still anonymous, and when the BBC interviews Kollwitz, she carries the mask. “I don’t think anyone who makes that poster can enter a museum and not think about what is on the walls and why,” she says.

Do women have to be naked to enter the museum? The poster was destined to have been a Commission of the New York Public Art Fund, but seeing the final result, financing was withdrawn. The guerrilla girls committed themselves to their message and put it in advertising and buses. “We decided to buy space in the New York buses. We also stick it to Our Anelves in the streets of New York.”

The poster threw the group into the center of attention and consolidated its style with a mass audience. The combination of humor, statistics and bold advertising slogans was the culmination of several years of solving how to address gender and racial inequality. The two initial posters of the group: What do thesis artists have in common? And these galleries do not show more than 10% of women artists or none, they were planted in walls, street lamps and telephone booths in New York, without the need for the decisions of those who directed the powerful art institutions.

The decision of guerrillas to adopt the language of advertising was in reaction to what they saw as the inefficiency of traditional protests. The group was formed in 1985 after attacking a protest outside the Museum of Modern Art in New York the previous year. The international painting and sculpture survey had only presented 17 women and eight color artists of 169 artists.

“A couple of us got used to this protest, and it was so clear that nobody cared. Everyone gets used to the museum. You know, all these signs about the art of women. They did not believe it for a minute. And that was really the moment of ‘Aha’.”

The “naked” poster, as Kollwitz refers to him, was a change of play. “We have crazy images, facts and humor, things to attract them, and if you really look at our posters, you will never see the art in the same way.”

The author and Podcastter Katy Hessel, in her book The Story of Art with Men, points out how the artists who appear in the 80s had grown up with televisions in their homes. “Playing with the stereotypes of the women of the media (and history of art), they turned to the control of the gaze and made it that.”

“The guerrilla girls attracted public attention to inequalities and systematic discrimination in the art world, and finally asked: how did the history of patriarchy in art history come out?”

From being an external force that pushes through space, its text based on text now hangs in the same places they once sought to provoke. His continuous anonymity is another invitation to remind women artists who fought in their time. All founding members are art professionals in their own right, but as guerrillas Girls, they carry the pseudonyms of deceased artists such as Frida Kahlo and Zubeida Agha.

“More than being anonymous, it is the way they do what is also really intelligent,” says Michael Wellen, a senior curator of Tate Modern in London, who has a free collection of his work on display. “There is a moment of education every time you discover who you are talking with.” Since its original nude count in the MET, the art world has changed. But the inequality between color and women artists compared to white men still exists. This can be not only who hangs on the walls but in other areas of the art market. For example, the works of art of women only represent 39% or sales of the gallery, according to an Art Basel report in 2024. Recent studies also point out that permanent collections in the main US galleries. UU. They are 85% white and 87% men. In the United Kingdom, it was only in 2023 that the Royal Academy in London exhibited Marina Abramović’s work life, which makes the first woman a great individual exposure in her main galleries.

“I think that is an undeniable change in how museums represent the history of contemporary art and art, and in large part, it is due to the light that guerrilla girls have shone in these inequalities,” says Wellen.

While the protest of the poster originally criticized who was allowed to hang on the walls of museums and galleries, this approach has evolved for the guerrillas, as well as for other activities of the artists, who are now scrutinizing of money from Howy Money are in funds in 2019, the art photographer of the United States and activist Nan Goldin accepted a protest of the protest of Guggenheim’s protest being thousands of prescriptions in the prescription of the prescription of the prescription of the prescription of the protection of the prescription. The Sackler family, owner of Purdue Pharkin, who pisanes to collect resources, feeding the US opioid crisis. The protest appeared in the documentary The Beauty and the Bloodshed.

Guerrilla Girls’s work has also evolved to assume broader issues, address environmental conerns and expand their worldwide signature style over the years. Founding members operate as a cell and have collaborated internationally, with approximately 60 taxpayers in Asia, Latin America and Europe. In March of this year, they created a poster with Bulgaran Women’s Fund. Do not deserve more than a thin portion of government? He criticized the lack of representation of women in the country’s government.

The monitoring of progress is difficult. At the years, the Girls guerrillas have reviewed the poster that threw them into the center of attention, making counts. It is a discordant comment on how small things can change despite public pressure. Between 1989, 2005 and 2012, the number of female nudes in the decrease, but the number of women real artists. Of course, this is not indicative of all institutions, but as always with their work, the message is clear: there is still more to do.

“I chose her because she was a political artist, and that is what I consider the guerrilla girls and me too,” says Kollwitz, when asked why he named herself after the German artist. Born in 1867, the true work of Käthe Kollwitz focused on women, and was deeply against war. Stylistically, his work is very different from the guerrilla, but the thematic content overlaps.

Guerrilla girls remain active, and cross the 40 -year -old threshold is a time to reflect, but also a time to look to the future. It is possible that someone who has been struggling against injustices for decades with a progress similar to a snail is exhausted, but Kollwitz says that the challenge of progress is what inspires the collective. In November, they will exhibit at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, and a graphic novel is in process. “We never stop causing problems,” she says. “Our fight is not over.”