How to Be a Guerrilla Girl

An exhibition celebrating 40 years of art, activism, and anonymity. Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum? Coinciding with the Guerrilla Girls’ 40th anniversary, How to Be a Guerrilla Girl offers a rare, behind-the-scenes look into the inner workings of the iconic feminist art collective. Drawing from the Getty Research Institute’s remarkable Guerrilla Girls archive, the exhibition highlights the strategies— anonymity, data gathering, protest actions, culture jamming, and grassroots distribution—that have defined the group’s groundbreaking practice since the mid-1980s.

The exhibition offers a sustained look into the archive, which documents the first two decades of Guerrilla Girls activity, and was acquired in 2008. The archive was amassed as the collective worked on projects, with members of the group depositing working drafts of posters, fan mail, photo shoots, internal correspondence, video and audio cassettes, and data tallies at a shared space. In the exhibition, the Guerrilla Girls’ best-known posters will be seen alongside this revealing material shedding light on the Guerrilla Girls’ practice as it developed within the social and cultural context of the late 20th-Century culture wars. Through this periodization, the show will contextualize their understandings of gender and intersectional feminism, their media practices of culture jamming, and their critical approach to art history.