What we can learn from “The Guerrilla Girls: The Art of Behaving Badly”
Photo credit: Patricia A. Maurice
It’s not just STEMM fields that present major challenges for women in academia and systemic roadblocks to success. We need to learn from and support our sisters in the arts and humanities.
By Patricia A. Maurice with Janet G. Hering
26 November 2024, DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.14181132
Our recent posts on Melinda French Gates’ book “The Moment of Lift” [1, 2] and Caroline Criado Perez’s book “Invisible Women” [2, 3] went beyond STEMM disciplines per se to encompass challenges women face in all aspects of their lives. Senior women leaders in STEMM need to be aware of broader women’s issues and willing to draw inspiration and advice from many different sources. We also need to understand that women in STEMM will not gain equity if we allow biased behaviors to continue unchecked in some corners of academia, no matter how seemingly remote from our own disciplines.
We can learn a lot from our sisters in Arts and Letters. The art world is notoriously male dominated. For much of history, women were forbidden to create art, to study with a master, to work in a formal studio, or to pursue art as a profession. Women who did pursue art were often relegated, like Mary Cassatt, to narrow subject matter such as sweet depictions of mothers and children. Although women around the world have embellished their homes, utensils, and clothing for as far back as we have artifacts, this often exquisite work is generally relegated to the far lesser domain of ‘craft.’ Throughout history, women have usually been kept so busy caring for hearth and home that they have little time for anything other than backbreaking physical labor. Aristocratic women could be trained in art but primarily as a domestic, genteel pursuit.
The dearth of women artists, authors, composers, and chefs through history led to the false perception that women simply lacked the intelligence and creativity to be ‘real’ artists. In her groundbreaking essay “A room of one’s own,” Virginia Woolf [5] began to explode these myths. She posed the idea that Shakespeare might have had a brilliant, talented sister who was not allowed to show the world her greatness:
“I told you in the course of this paper that Shakespeare had a sister; but do not look for her in Sir Sidney Lee’s life of the poet. She died young – alas, she never wrote a word. She lies buried where the omnibuses now stop, opposite the Elephant and Castle. Now my belief is that this poet who never wrote a word and was buried at the crossroads still lives. She lives in you and in me, and in many other women who are not here tonight, for they are washing up the dishes and putting the children to bed.”
In 1970-71, Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro began a first-of-its kind and short-lived Feminist Art Program at Fresno State College [6]. Despite such efforts, the fact that women were not allowed to be artists and that their work was not displayed in galleries and museums, published, or produced continues to shape attitudes toward women artists to the current day.
The Guerrilla Girls
The back cover of the book, “Guerrilla Girls: The Art of Behaving Badly,” by The Guerrilla Girls [7] contains a brief historical note about the group, which begins.
“In 1985, a bunch of feminist masked avengers began plastering posters all over downtown New York. They named galleries, museums, critics, collectors, and white male artists who contributed to an art system prejudiced against women and artists of color. Since then, the collective has produced hundreds of projects, exposing bias and corruption in art, film, pop culture and politics. Their unforgettable graphics have become a global phenomenon.”
Note that the ‘masks’ are appropriately gorilla masks.
Many of their posters highlighted the extremely poor representation of women artists in museums and galleries. One of their most clever and eye-catching posters featured an artwork of a female nude with a gorilla mask head and the heading “Do women have to be naked to get into the Met Museum?” This illustrates dramatically Caroline Criado Perez’s later observation [3] that women are hyper-visible to men as sexual objects and when needed to do unpaid work but invisible when it would matter, for example to make the world more equitable for women.
The work of The Guerrilla Girls has succeeded in shaming the art world to some extent. Walk into any major art museum in the world, including modern and contemporary art, and you may see a temporary exhibit of a women artist (if you’re lucky even the Guerrilla Girls) or a special room dedicated to women artists. In the past few years, we’ve even observed that things appear to be getting somewhat better in permanent collections. Nevertheless, women’s art still only accounts for a tiny fraction of total sales at art auctions as reported by Forbes in the 2022 article “The $192 Billion Gender Gap in Art” [8]. The same article reported that researchers found [9] that “work by female artists sells for a whopping 42% less than work by male artists” based on “a sample of 1.9 million auction transactions from 1970 to 2016 for 69,189 individual artists”. Women often dominate the student body of university art classes, but ‘trickle up’ to academic and other leadership positions and major art shows is slow.
The irony of invisible women tackling invisibility
It is ironic that, in order to move women (and other under-represented) artists and their work from beneath the cloak of invisibility to proper representation in museums and galleries, the Guerrilla Girls felt the need to hide behind gorilla masks. The Guerrilla Girls remain anonymous today, including as authors of their own book. While this might be ironic, it is not surprising. After all, women who speak out for equity are often attacked, including physically. There is a huge stigma associated with being identified as a feminist. Women can lose what voices they have at universities, galleries, and museums, as well as on fellowship and award committees, if they are identified as activists. Being invisible is all too often the norm for women [3].
How can we help?
What more can we women in STEMM do to help our sisters in the art world? The National Museum of Women in the Arts has some great suggestions on their web page [10], including:
· Praise institutions that strive for gender equality.
· When exhibitions are unequal, let your voice be heard.
· Support women artists and institutions that exhibit their work.
Some powerful female art collectors such as Valeria Napoleone are now focusing on commissioning works by female artists and on getting them into art museums [11]. I am not wealthy, but within my limited budget, I do my best to buy art produced by women and members of other under-represented groups. When I travel, I try to bring home art made by women as a souvenir. I read books by women authors and watch movies by female directors. This blog post is an effort to raise awareness.
As senior women leaders in academia, we can help further by advocating for women faculty in the arts to be allocated the studios, safety equipment, library materials, and other resources that they need. We can work to ensure that all arts faculty receive decent salaries. We can push for our university art museums to include more works by artists from under-represented groups. We can talk to our colleagues in the arts, listen to them and help solve the problems they identify. When we play a role in university-wide tenure and promotion decisions, we can be aware of historical and ongoing biases and try to ensure that women artists are treated equitably even if it means disrupting entrenched, hierarchical systems. We can partner with artists to help bring science and technology to art and art to science and technology. This is something that I have found personally rewarding for many years. We can embrace the universality of universities, working to collaborate rather than compete with our colleagues in arts and letters.
What can we learn from the Guerrilla Girls?
One of the most important lessons we can learn from the Guerrilla Girls is: if women artists can use their art to address inequities in their field, women in STEMM should also be able to use our expertise to help address inequities in our fields. We can do research on oft-neglected topics such as women’s health. We can design computers, cars, and cities to be safe and functional for women. We can teach STEMM students using inclusive material and examples. We can call out inequities when we see them and support one another.
Conclusions and questions for further thought
One of the most famous posters produced by the Guerrilla Girls lists “The Advantages of Being a Woman Artist.” Here, we came up with our own list specific to being a female professor in a College of Engineering. Many of the items in our list apply to other STEMM disciplines as well.
Here are some questions for further thought:
· What more would you add to this list of ‘Advantages’?
· If your university (or alma mater) has an art museum, does it include works by female artists? If not, what will you do or say to help improve representation?
· When was the last time you visited a museum or a gallery? Did you see works by female artists?
Notes and References
[1] “The Moment of Lift: How empowering women changes the world” by Melinda Gates, 2019, New York, Flatiron Books
[2] https://www.epistimi.org/blog/the-moment-of-lift-by-melinda-gates
[3] “Invisible Women: Data bias in a world designed for men” by Caroline Criado Perez, 2019, United States, Abrams.
[5] “A room of one’s own,” 7th edition by Virginia Woolf, 2004, Penguin Books (from
[6] https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/494182 accessed August 18, 2024.
[7] “Guerrilla Girls: The Art of Behaving Badly” by the Guerrilla Girls, 2020, www.chroniclebooks.com ISBN: 978-1-4521-7581-2
[8] The $192 Billion gender gap in art, by Kim Elsesser, Forbes, August 30, 2022
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kimelsesser/2022/08/30/the-192-billion-gender-gap-in-art/
[9] Adams, R.B. et al. (2021) “Gendered Prices”, The Review of Financial Studies, 34: 3789–3839, https://academic.oup.com/rfs/article/34/8/3789/6218783, accessed November 18, 2024.
[10] Advocacy, National Museum of Women in the Arts, https://nmwa.org/support/advocacy/, accessed November 18, 2024.
[11] https://news.artnet.com/art-world/valeria-napoleone-female-artists-museum-307723, accessed November 18, 2024.