-["Frida" VO] There's nothing worse than the word
"art appreciation."
It implies that you're just there awestruck,
and whatever you're being fed, you appreciate.
Art really is about discourse and about discussion.
-["Frida"] Do you have any ideas what museums could be?
-Decolonizing museums.
Like, not having stolen things.
-If your art is for the public, then the public should have a
right to express their opinions and views.
-As a young artist, like, sometimes I see things and,
like, get so frustrated and feel like nothing has changed.
♪♪♪
-["Frida" VO] From the very beginning,
we have been fighting against sexism,
racism, and the death hold that wealthy people
and wealthy institutions have on art and culture.
-40 million dollars, 1-5-0-6.
-The Guerrilla Girls will complain about anything that
pisses them off, and they always do it in an unexpected way.
-[Coco VO] What the artist has to say about things other than
his or her art has not always been considered that important
by the arbiters of the art world.
And the Guerrilla Girls were at the forefront of doing that
starting in the 1980s.
-[Frances] The power of the Guerrilla Girls' work was that whenever I
looked at their material, I felt implicated.
It wasn't somebody else's problem, it was my problem.
♪♪♪
-["Frida"] I'm one of the founding members of the
Guerrilla Girls, and I've been involved in just about
everything the Guerrilla Girls have done since 1985.
I'm kind of a lifer.
But I am, in my real life, an artist.
-["Käthe"] And I'm also a founder of the Guerrilla Girls
and also a lifelong political artist.
♪elegant orchestral music♪
In fall of 1984, the Museum of Modern Art did this exhibition
– an international survey of painting and sculpture.
There were 169 artists in the show,
and only 17 women, and very few artists of color.
And women artists in New York were really pissed off.
♪aggressive rock music♪
-["Frida"] We were educated to sort of respect all
the institutions and the people that were making decisions and
the people who were writing art history,
but it dawned on us that it was filled with its own biases and
limitations.
-["Käthe"] We're marching in a picket line in front of
the Museum of Modern Art, and we realize not one person going
into the museum cares.
[music slows to a stop]
And that was the "aha" moment.
It was so clear that there had to be a better way
to convince people and make them understand how much
discrimination there really was – both racism and sexism –
in the art world.
♪moody synth music♪
-Most of the women who are doing all the bitching are completely talentless.
For example, like, the top women artists,
you don't hear them making these embarrassing feminist pleas.
-["Frida"] The more we looked at the numbers,
we realized that there was a systematic elimination of women
and artists of color from the so-called mainstream of the art world.
-[Guerrilla Girl] What does it mean that museums are getting
subsidies and have no obligations to be ethnically diverse?
-["Frida"] We thought it would be really important to
just state the facts
and see what people did with the facts.
We met at my loft, and we were just a hodgepodge of artists.
We called ourselves "the Guerrilla Girls" because we had
to become anonymous to say what was obvious.
♪♪♪
Kathë and I came up with the two first posters.
The very first poster was this list of male artists who allowed
their work to be shown in galleries that showed fewer than
10 percent women or none at all.
-[Kathë VO] When one worked, we would do another.
When another worked, we would do another.
The facts are a hugely important part of it.
But also, we had this kind of outrageous,
in-your-face design and crazy headlines that you couldn't
totally ignore.
We passed the hat around to pay for printing.
We were sneaking around New York in the middle of the night
putting these things up.
And people saw them and all hell broke loose.
♪energizing electronic music♪
We mostly did them in SoHo and the East Village,
which were the big art neighborhoods of that time.
So we put these posters up on the gallery windows right below
the name of the gallery.
♪♪♪
-["Frida" VO] It was so exciting to go out the next day
and to see a dialogue being ignited.
♪♪♪
I remember a gallery director came by with her son,
and he singsong-edly sang,
"Mommy, why is your name up there?"
[laughs]
-If you look at the art schools, at least half of them are women.
So what happens to these women?
Where do they go?
But that's not the art world discriminating,
that's their choices.
♪ethereal synth music♪
-["Frida" VO] The advantages of being a woman artist:
Working without the pressure of success.
Not having to be in shows with men.
Having a relief from the art world with your four freelance jobs.
Being reassured that whatever work you make,
it will be labeled "feminine."
Knowing your career might pick up after you're 80.
Over the years, about 60 people were in and out of the group.
Collaboration was wonderful when it worked.
It was painful when it didn't work.
We didn't understand where it would go,
but we knew that what we were saying,
moment to moment,
was something that was irrefutable.
♪♪♪
-I'm kind of new on the scene here but I love it.
-["Frida"] Well, do you ever think to count how many women,
how many artists of color?
-[woman] Oh, absolutely. -["Frida"] Yeah.
And does that change your attitude or your idea?
-[woman] It has a lot, and the idea,
I think that's why maybe my
mother and grandmother were never really that interested.
Because they didn't see anything that was done by people that
looked like them.
♪sparse ethereal music♪
-["Frida" VO] I always felt distance from the
socioeconomics in the art world.
I grew up in Pittsburgh in a working-class family.
There was a lot of trauma in my family with parents dying
and getting sick, and I had a lot to take care of,
so I really never felt the freedom to rebel
in my adolescence.
-["Käthe" VO] I grew up in New York City.
I was an activist in my teens,
and I got kicked out of college for being in a demonstration,
and that kind of pushing the envelope
has always been my life, and it's always been the kind of art
I do.
♪♪♪
-["Frida"] I was always uncomfortable with this idea
that there was a level playing field,
because it was not my experience in life or in the art world.
So the minute I felt the freedom to criticize it,
it was wonderful, it was great, it opened up a whole part of my brain.
♪quirky upbeat music♪
-["Käthe"] I couldn't stop.
I can't explain why, but I couldn't stop.
And it became as important to me as anything else I did in my life.
♪♪♪
-["Käthe"] Those of us who were unfairly left out of
the system, it was like a breath of fresh air.
It was so-- it seemed daring, it seemed exciting,
and the people on the posters were really pissed off.
-[Guerrilla Girl] They now feel they have to contend with us as
a power.
And it's very bizarre to be at a point where I get more respect
with a gorilla mask on than I get with it off.
♪energetic percussion♪
-[Frances VO] In 2006, we had, at The Tate Modern,
a small room with a group of the Guerrilla Girls' posters.
But I was put on the back foot by journalists grilling me about
precisely what the Guerrilla Girls were charging us with –
lack of representation of women artists,
lack of diversity –
and I had no way of responding.
My inability to respond was published in The Guardian.
I felt profoundly exposed, profoundly embarrassed.
And in that moment, the Guerrilla Girls' wonderful pink
letter really resonated with me -- that idea that I had agency
in this and I had to take some responsibility.
-["Frida" VO] [echoing] Dearest art collector,
it has come to our attention that your collection,
like most, does not contain enough art by women.
We know that you feel terrible about this
and will rectify the situation immediately.
All our love, Guerrilla Girls.
-[Frances VO] About a year later, I took over the leadership of building the
international collection, and I presented a strategy to
massively broaden the diversity of the collection,
and to really address the representation of women.
That moment with the Guerrilla Girls was profoundly influential.
♪♪♪
-["Frida" VO] There are wonderful individuals on the
inside trying to change things.
But there is a corporate, capitalist,
institutional structure that's connected to much larger forces.
-["Zubeida"] Right now, art institutions do not get enough
government funding, and so they're reliant on individuals
to donate to them to make art exhibitions happen.
A lot of the people are very wealthy individuals for whom art
is an investment asset, and so they will support exhibitions
that raise the value of their art collection.
I feel like in any other industry,
that would be considered insider trading or something,
but it's not.
-["Frida" VO] [echoing] Guerrilla Girls' Code of Ethics
for Art Museums:
Thou shalt not give more than three retrospectives to any
artist whose dealer is the brother of the chief curator.
Thou shalt provide lavish funerals for women and artists
of color, who thou planneth to exhibit only after their death.
-[Käthe VO] We did a whole series of these posters.
After many years, we thought it would be great to do an updated
version and build the actual monument
and drag it around to every museum we could possibly get to.
-["Frida" VO] [echoing] Thou shalt honor all thine employees,
never undermine their efforts to unionize,
and pay them a living wage.
Thou shalt banish board members who make the world a worse place.
If thou exhibiteth super-expensive art bought at
super-fancy galleries and donated by super-rich collectors
for super-big tax deductions, thou must renameth thyself
The Museum of Super-Rich People's Art.
-[Käthe] Everybody, this is a monument we think
needs to be outside every single museum.
So who wants to talk?
-The public has no say whatsoever;
they just go and look at the art.
What these museums are doing is they've basically turned it into
a business.
-[Käthe] You are now an honorary Guerrilla Girl.
-[man] Oh, really? -[Käthe] Yes.
-Thank you.
-Now, I think, in a lot of these institutions,
they've, like, clung onto the fact that it's trendy to be,
like, putting art out there that is promoting social justice,
but when you look at what they're actually doing in
practice, it doesn't support those ideals.
-["Frida"] Oh, I agree.
We think that trustees should be chosen who make the world a
better place.
What did you see in the museum today?
-Oh, we didn't go in. -We are yet to go in.
-We came to meet you first. -["Frida"] [gasps]
-Yeah. -["Frida"] Oh, that's so great!
-[woman] Yeah, we saw it on your Instagram!
-["Frida"] Thank you so much!
-I consider my art Guerrilla art.
Well, like, I, like, put a poster up in my city in India
and stuff like that about mental health.
-["Frida"] That's wonderful! -["Käthe"] Fantastic.
-This is great. Oh my gosh.
-[woman] Thank you, thank you so much!
-I took, like, 15. -Aw, thank you.
-["Käthe"] We've been so lucky that people all over the
world want our work.
♪ambient oscillating synths♪
-["Zubeida" VO] The Guerrilla Girls' work has always
been statistics.
People don't believe you unless you show them the numbers.
♪♪♪
Without the numbers, you really have a false sense of diversity.
-["Frida" VO] For the last 20, 25, 30 years,
we get people saying to us,
"I never knew this before."
Our stuff is easy to understand,
and then you take off with it on your own.
-I've been teaching now for almost 30 years.
I make sure that my students are aware of the Guerrilla Girls' contributions.
They get museum shows in Europe,
not so much in the United States.
I think that that's an indication of the resistance
still to the practice and to the message of the Guerrilla Girls,
despite the fact that there are probably, you know,
200 art history majors writing papers on them right now.
-["Zubeida" VO] One of the most exciting things for me has
been the shift where the younger generation are learning about
the Guerrilla Girls earlier and earlier -- in high school,
or they saw the work on social media.
It gives me a lot of hope.
-["Frida"] Bye-bye!
And I hope you find things that you love to look at!
Can't we think about art as not being about
winners, but about something that we all need in our lives?
Thank you so much, and good luck with your own work!
-[man] This is a big moment in my life!
Yay!
-["Frida"] There are so many cultural traditions where
art is collective, and it's done in a community,
and artists work together.
They might do individual work,
but they somehow present a kinder idea of what it means
to have a creative life.
♪♪♪
["Käthe"] Come over!
♪ ethereal ambient music ♪