The year of the Guerrilla—that’s what 2025 is. Not the insurgent kind with a gun in her hand, but the artistic kind with a paintbrush. The Guerrilla Girls, the witty and irreverent activist movement battling sexism in the art world, is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year with shows in D.C., London, Germany and Norway. Their largest retrospective, “How to Be a Guerrilla Girl,” is at L.A.’s Getty Research Institute through April 26, 2026.
“Our exhibition is drawn from the archives, housed here at the GRI. That’s really the cornerstone in addition to more contemporary works that are on loan,” says co-curator Kristin Juarez about the show, which brings together posters, planning documents and ephemera. “It tells the story of how they worked together, how these works came to be, giving a behind-the-scenes look at their collaboration and how they thought through these processes.”
A newly commissioned work for the exhibition explores the Getty’s collection of European painting and sculpture depicting violence against women. It’s introduced with a text that says, “Too much violence in our culture today? Take a look at these old masterpieces.”
Familiar figures are presented in a single composition, each with comic strip-like speech bubbles. Included is Orazio Gentileschi’s Danaë and the Shower of Gold (1622), where a nude Danaë, imprisoned by her father, reaches up toward a gold torrent symbolizing Zeus. The captions tell her story, ending with the comment: “The artist showed me naked and willing when in fact I’m a prisoner being raped.” Nearby is Lucretia, painted by Orazio’s daughter, Artemisia. The scene of this Roman noblewoman’s rape is a subject Gentileschi often returned to after her own experience being raped by fellow artist Agostino Tassi, who spent less than a year in prison for his crime.
Also included is an oversized version of the Mona Lisa with a fig leaf covering her mouth, part of their billboard, First They Want to Take Away a Woman’s Right to Choose…Now They’re Censoring Art. The show wouldn’t be complete without a copy of their 1989 billboard, Do Women Have to Be Naked to Get into the Met. Museum?, which depicts Ingres’ Grande Odalisque wearing a gorilla mask. Included are statistics noting that 5 percent of paintings in the museum’s modern art section are painted by women, while 85 percent of the nudes are women. Included are early designs for the billboard, as well as updated versions from 2005 and 2012.
“What the Guerrilla Girls were doing is collecting the evidence,” says Juarez, noting how data has been essential to their message, exhibited here in archival photographs, annotated charts, research files and handwritten tallies. “So, when they’re developing posters that look at galleries and collections, they can say, ‘No, it hasn’t changed, or maybe it has.’ The methodology is relevant in holding institutions accountable.”
The statistics indicate chronic underrepresentation, the result of ingrained ideas formed through an old-boys-club mentality. Wealthy collectors, many of whom sit on the boards at major cultural institutions, favor works that mirror their own ideas and worldviews. “The system of legitimization within the art world is a problem,” says co-curator Zanna Gilbert. “The Guerrilla Girls are interested in promoting different ideas of what art is and can be: What is genius, and what is art for? It can be for creating community. The values that underpin our art world can also be changed.”
The group leads by example, lowballing their posters, although they could charge more. “They’ve never created a situation where they are making their work inaccessible, limiting circulation to make it more valuable, which is what the art world tends to do,” adds Gilbert.
It began in 1984 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, when a group of women (future founding members) protested an exhibition that featured only 13 women out of 169 artists. The response was vague curiosity and a collective yawn. In their frustration, they realized that a concerted effort was needed to change attitudes about equal representation in art.
Women artists began holding formal meetings in lofts and studios, eventually creating a poster campaign that would blanket the city, and they held art institutions and galleries accountable. Concerned that their activism might damage their reputations, participants donned gorilla masks and used aliases. Employing eye-catching design and advertising techniques, statistics and humor, they painted the town in wheatpaste posters. “We’ve encouraged our gallery to show more women of color, have you?” queried a letter sent to prominent male artists in the 1980s. Responders signed an agreement, and their names appeared on posters advocating for greater representation.
One of the group’s most famous posters ironically lists the advantages of being a woman artist, items like “Knowing your career might pick up after you’re eighty” and “Having more time to work after your mate dumps you for someone younger” or “Getting your picture in the art magazines wearing a gorilla suit.” Early drafts of the list accompany it, with one including a list of advantages to being a male artist, among them, “Being considered a ‘good investment’.”
“That’s something we show—the process by which a poster would come to be,” Gilbert says. “They had to agree; it was consensus-based. There were a lot of ideas that didn’t make it onto the final poster. But if they agreed on something, then people would come with different ideas, and they would hash it out together, brainstorming and whittling these things down.”
Membership in the group rotated continuously, but members were always anonymous, borrowing monikers from historically underrepresented artists like Frida Kahlo and German expressionist Käthe Kollwitz. Members contributed in any way they could. One founding member had a background in advertising, so she worked on designing posters. Others performed menial tasks, such as going through the mail. Some focused on guerrilla actions at universities or booking TV appearances and getting the word out.
“If we believe in art and the power of art, then we also need to listen to it and help it affect change in our own institutions,” offers Gilbert. “I think there’s a really intransigent part of the art world that we see 40 years after the Guerrilla Girls started. Maybe it hasn’t changed all that much, the most market-driven part of the art world. But certainly institutions have changed and have better representation of women artists and artists of color.”
Over the past year, artists such as Lucy Bull, Firelei Báez, Frida Kahlo and Jadé Fadojutimi have set auction records, perhaps due in part to the efforts of the Guerrilla Girls. Juarez sees changes throughout the art world, although change can be frustratingly slow. “To be relevant,” she says of the establishment. “They need to be engaging with and showing work that represents the communities they’re a part of.”
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