By: Ellen C. Caldwell
for JSTOR Daily
The feminist art collective known as the Guerrilla Girls recently celebrated its 30 year anniversary along with additional accolades in the art world. In the past year, the Whitney Museum and the Walker Art Center both purchased the collective’s full portfolio of 88 works ranging from 1985 to 2012.
In 1985, a group of anonymous women came together to protest MoMA’s exhibition “An International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture.” They were appalled and then motivated by the show’s staggering lack of diversity. As Kim Kanatani and Vas Prabhu sum it up, the exhibit was “comprised of approximately 169 artists, thirteen of whom were women and none of whom were artists of color.”
In response to these numbers, the feminist art collective was born. Women from the art world came together, shrouded in secrecy behind their famed gorilla masks, and began to force the art world and museums to take note…