Guerilla Girls, Do Women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum?, 1989 4 Favorite 

Practitioner: 

Date: 

Jan 1 1989

Location: 

New York

The Guerilla Girls are a group of feminist activist artists, who use facts, humor, and outrageous visuals to expose gender and ethnic bias and corruption in politics, art, film, and pop culture in their artworks. In 1989, they designed this billboard for the Public Art Fund (PAF) in New York, aimed to criticize the museum institutions for under-representing female artists and objectifying women. The PAF rejected this piece, deeming it “too provocative.” Instead, the Guerilla Girls rented advertising space on NYC buses and ran the ad themselves.

External sources: 

https://magazine.artland.com/10-controversial-artworks-changed-art-history/#:~:t…
Posted by Mmc10149@nyu.edu on Feb 25 2025

Staff rating: 

0

Effectiveness

How does this project help?

Activates (people)Energizes and organizes people into action. Can include emotion work
Amplifies (issue or campaign)Brings public and political attention to an issue or campaign.  Can include prefigurative action, making the invisible visible.
Shifts (culture)Shifts the cultural landscape in order to imagine and enable change.
Strengthens (community)Strengthens, builds and celebrates community through ritual and/or symbol.

Timeframe For change

This project seems to be part of a campaign with a clear long-term goal. Long-term goals tend to be things like: end racism; end homophobia; make the sun stand still in the sky. A campaign with a long-term goal also needs to have some kind of theory of change.

Notes

This project is effective in that it calls out and amplifies the disproportionate representation within museums. There were concrete numbers that this group followed that showed museums started to shift their displays following this campaign