Bullseye with Jesse Thorn is a production of MaximumFun.org and is distributed by NPR.

I'm Jesse Thorn, it's Bullseye.

If you go to an art museum, contemporary, encyclopedic, local, whatever, odds are most

of the art showing there was made by white men. Even if you leave out the Renaissance painters

and the Dutch masters or whatever, still, it remains in 2019 uncommon to see a solo show

by a woman or a person of color. That was even more true in 1985 when some of New York's

most prominent galleries showed less than 10% women artists. Others were showing no women

at all. Enter the Gorilla Girls. That's Gorilla with a U and an E, by the way.

They're an anonymous collective of artists and pretty much all of them were living in New York at the time.

They decided the best way to fight discrimination in the art world was to make art about the discrimination.

Paste it onto the walls all over Lower Manhattan, put on a Gorilla mask and shout it out loud

with a bullhorn in front of the Museum of Modern Art. The reactions from galleries and curators

were a mix of anger and annoyance, but things changed slowly.

The Gorilla Girls have entered their third decade as a collective, morphing in membership as time has passed.

They still make art for the streets they have also shown in galleries and museums.

And I got to talk with one of their founding members, Katta Colvitz. That's not her real name,

of course. They are anonymous, but we'll get into that. Let's hear the conversation.

Katta Colvitz of the Gorilla Girls, welcome to Bullseye. I'm so happy to have you on the show.

Thanks, Jesse. You're really great to be here.

So each of the Gorilla Girls, I guess with the exception of one in the course of their Gorilla Girl

initiation, chooses the name of an artist who was a woman who was under recognized in part for that reason.

Can you tell me about the artist whose name you've taken?

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