The Guerilla Girls

Bullseye with Jesse Thorn

NPR

Society & Culture

4.7 • 2.7K Ratings

🗓️ 8 May 2026

⏱️ 39 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In the mid '80s, an art collective known as the Guerilla Girls drew attention to issues of discrimination and representation in galleries and museums all over the world. They wore gorilla masks while doing it. Jesse talks to a founding member of the Guerrilla Girls, who goes by Kathe Kollwitz. She reflects on the origins of the group, anonymity in the art world, and what the group means now more than 40 years later. A version of this interview aired in 2019.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Bullseye with Jesse'm Jesse Thorne.
0:29.4	If you go to an art museum, a contemporary one like mocha or an encyclopedic one like the Louvre,
0:36.8	a little local one, like the Bakersfield
0:38.7	Art Museum. Ods are that most of the art showing there was made by white men. Even if you
0:46.0	leave out the Renaissance painters and Dutch masters and stuff, still, it is still not that common
0:53.0	to see a solo show by a woman or a person of color in an American museum.
0:57.5	In fact, a study in 2019 revealed that across 18 major museums in the United States,
1:03.7	85% of artists represented were white and 87% were men.
1:09.9	This was even more true in 1985, when many of New York's most prominent museums showed even fewer
1:16.4	women, and some galleries showed none at all.
1:20.1	Enter the Gorilla Girls.
1:22.2	That's Gorilla with a U and an E, as an underground fighter, by the way.
1:27.1	They are an anonymous collective of artists.
1:30.2	Pretty much all of them were living in New York at the time. And they decided the best way to
1:34.4	fight discrimination in the art world was to make art about discrimination. Paste it onto the
1:39.8	walls all over Lower Manhattan, put on a gorilla mask, literally gorilla masks, and shouted out loud with a bullhorn in front of the Museum of Modern Art.
1:49.2	The reactions from gallerists and curators were a mix of anger and annoyance, but things changed, slowly.
1:57.4	The guerrilla girls have just celebrated 40 years as a collective.
2:01.6	Their membership has morphed over the years, but they still make art for the streets.
2:06.1	One thing that has changed, they've also shown in galleries and museums.
2:10.2	Just last month, the Getty here in Los Angeles hosted a retrospective for the guerrilla girls.
2:16.2	Back in 2019, I got to talk with one of the founding members.
	...

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