Welcome to Breaking Down Patriarchy. I'm Amy McThea. All the best. In the spring of 1985,

the New York Museum of Modern Art launched an exhibition called An International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture.

This exhibition claimed to survey that era's most important painters and sculptors from 17 countries.

And on the roster of 165 artists, there were only

13 women. The proportion of artists of color was even smaller. One account puts the number at

eight among 165. None of those artists of color were women. The women's caucus for for the Arts led a protest across the street from MoMA, calling on people to boycott the exhibit.

But their picketing was ignored, leading seven women to form a group that wanted to take more radical action to bring gender equity to the art world.

They called themselves the guerrilla girls, spelled G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A,

from the Spanish word, guerra, meaning war.

But their members also embrace the way the word sounds in English,

and they wear gorilla masks when conducting their demonstrations.

Periodically, the guerrilla girls conduct weenie and banana counts, wherein members visited

institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art and counted nudes, noting the ratio of male to

female subjects, as well as the ratio of male to female artists represented in the various collections.

For example, data gathered from their survey in the Met in

1989 showed that women artists had produced less than 5% of the works in the modern art galleries,

while 85% of the nudes were female. Today we're going to talk about patriarchy in the art world,

drawing a long line before the

guerrilla girls and going right up until the present day. And to guide us on this fascinating

and rather infuriating trajectory, I am joined by art historian Sunday, Reni. Welcome, Sunday.

Thank you. Thanks for having me. I'm so excited to have this conversation. I'll just introduce our friendship by saying that we met in Paris a year ago in art museums.

Yeah. And you were such a fabulous guide, kind of like a world-changing guide for my daughter and myself. And so it's been, yeah, so wonderful to be in touch since then.

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