Kathe Kollwitz, a founding member of the art collective the Guerilla Girls

Episode notes

(Photo by Guerrilla Girls, courtesy guerrillagirls.com)

If you go to an art museum: contemporary, encyclopedic, local – odds are most of the art displayed was made by white men. Even if you leave out the renaissance painters and the Dutch Masters. It’s still not that common to see a solo show by a woman or a person of color these days. 

In fact, a study in 2019 revealed that across 18 major U.S. Museums, 85% of artists represented were white. 87% were men. And this was even more true in 1985. When many of New York’s most prominent museums showed even fewer women, and some galleries showed none at all.

In 1984, a group of women started an art collective called the Guerrilla Girls. The group was created in response to the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition: “An International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture.” The exhibit’s roster of 165 artists only included 13 women. The number of artists of color was even smaller, and none of them were women.

They decided the best way to fight discrimination in the art world was to make art about the discrimination. They took the art to the streets. They pasted it onto the walls all over lower Manhattan. The group demonstrated in front of the museum with placards and picket lines. And they wore gorilla masks while doing it.

They have entered their fourth decade as a collective, morphing in membership as the time went on. They still make art for the streets but have also shown in galleries and museums, too.

Jesse talks to a founding member of the Guerrilla Girls, who goes by Kathe Kollwitz. She’ll reflect on the origins of the group, her anonymity in the art world and what the group means now more than 40 years later.

A version of this interview aired in May of 2019.