 The room in the chat box, you'll find the link for tonight's event, which features library information as well as links to the Gorilla Girls, their book, and Chronicle books. And we'll get started at seven o'clock on the dot. And welcome, YouTube viewers. The number one question is, will I be able to watch this again? The answer is yes. And that is in the chat box again. If I could get someone from the audience to let me know they see my screen and hear me clear. And I do thank you. I do see a hand raised. We'll hopefully get some time towards the end for questions and answers. And you can use the Q&A box for that tonight. We also are featuring closed captioning, and that is a feature you can choose to use or not. And you would just hover over the closed captioning and either use it or disable it. Oh, Mr. Maynez, thank you for being here, sir. I sure can repost that information. There we go. And I will continue to repost information. And send some follow-up emails. I still see folks filling up the room. If you want to let us know what territory you're joining us from today, you could do that as well. All right. I'm going to jump in and we're going to get started. So first off, again, thank you all for being here, attendees and panelists. I am always mind blown at my job that I get to promote and bring in these amazing people. So this is part of our One City One Book campaign. And we will be hosting events about the themes of Chanel Miller's book, Know My Name. And Chanel Miller is an artist. You can see her work at the Asian Art Museum right now from Hyde Street, as well as along the vitrines of the main library. So go check that out. And let's do this. We'd like to welcome you to the unceded land of the Ohlone Tribal people and acknowledge the many Ramutush Ohlone Tribal groups and families as the rightful stewards in the lands in which we reside here in the Bay Area. Our library is committed to upholding and uplifting the names of these lands and community members from these nations with whom we live together. We encourage you to learn more about first persons, land rights, and indigenous culture. And that link has some great reading lists. And we have lots of events about indigenous cultures. And check out our YouTube for all of our past events. Readings from Mexico City, right on. And then a brief statement from our racial equity committee about the recent violence targeting Asian and Asian Americans. We definitely condemn the horrendous violence against Asians and Asian Americans in our communities, our state, and nationwide, both the reported and invisible crimes that have occurred. We stand in solidarity with our Asian community neighbors and colleagues distressed and hurt by these attacks. The library is determined to work with our city and communities to recognize and dismantle the discrimination and violence that has been perpetrated. We also want to acknowledge that these events are complicated by the entanglement of anti-black and anti-Asian stereotypes in the reporting of these acts of violence. We acknowledge the reduction of humanity and harm done to the black community by the coverage and hateful commentary that has been deployed. Anti-black and anti-Asian racism both uphold white supremacy. We are all harmed by these racist structures. We believe everyone has a stake at dismantling white supremacy in the favor of true multi-racial democracy. And our library is working so diligently on our racial equity and our racial equity statements and commitment. And so if you just Googled SFPL and racial equity, you would find a lot of the work that committee is working on. And we'll provide some resources about Asian Pacific and Asian Pacific Islanders, Americans, and resources. It is definitely not safe to not wear your mask outside. So please keep doing that and protect my library family. All of our libraries are starting to trickle open. So we have that wonderful curbside pickup. Please wear your mask and protect all of our lovely family working out there. This beautiful art is by Samuel Rodriguez. Check out his Instagram. As I said, part of our Once Anyone book allows us to have many, many events. Every Monday night throughout April, we'll be hosting events called Know Your Name. And a couple other great events associated with this. This Sunday, I'm really excited about this. We'll be hosting a panel of female creators, women creators, and feel what I, there's a typo thing, feel what I felt is a quote that Chanel had in an interview, Chanel Miller had in an interview. And it really struck a chord with these four amazing women. So please come here. These different musician, dancer, visual artist, painter, muralist, and another dancer and writer and moderator will be joining us. So Sunday, 1 p.m., come join with us again. Definitely wanted to point out this. Aisha Shayita Simmons, filmmaker, director. She just won a Co-Lambda Award Prize for 2020. And she is going to be screening her film, Know the Rape Documentary. And we'll have a director's talk afterwards. April 12th, lots of great stuff. And a big thank you to our friends at the San Francisco Public Library and all of our friends and sponsors that helped made One City One Book such a amazing success and being able to bring us all these programs. I also want to shout out to Bay Area Women Against Rape Organization who have been working with us all through this One City One Book campaign and who right now have folks on the line if you need any help. They are there for us and they will be there with us any time. They definitely have 24 hour hotline, but they are on call right now for SFPL viewers. SF4 is a, sorry, I put that in the panelist and try that again, SF4 is a woman of color and volunteer-based organization providing support, resources, advocacy and education for San Francisco community, healing from sexual assault. So like I said, we are close partnership with them, this campaign, and they are all there for us and there for you. And my email is also in this document if you need to reach out. I can help you find specific help or resources. All right, and now for the big event, I can't even believe like some of the people I've got to work with since Shelter in Place are like humongous check marks and I can just retire. So the Gorilla Girls are definitely one of them. How amazing is it to have legendary Gorilla Girls, Frida Kahlo and Callowits here to discuss their new book, their role in historic activism and dedication to disrupting art, the art world, but also Gorilla Girling, the discrimination and racism seen in Hollywood speaking out on topics such as homelessness, sexual violence and politics. One of my favorite quotes was about the Gorilla Girls that's featured in the book is from Bell Hooks and as she says, the work of the Gorilla Girls represents the most powerful political union between theory and practice. The Gorilla Girls are a group of political artists who have been exploring gender biases and discrimination in art and culture for over 30 years. The art of behaving badly is the first book to catalog their entire career of the Gorilla Girls from 1985 to the present. And so without further ado, the Gorilla Girls. Satya, what are we going to talk about? Oh, I thought we were having questions. Okay. Well, it's a, there's certainly a lot to talk about right now. We put together some images that we can all look at too because in writing our and conceptualizing and designing this book of all of our work, it was so interesting just to see the through lines how from the very beginning, anti-racism, anti-sexism, all kinds of political issues and also the big issue right now, which we will discuss, museum corruption and income inequality. Well, maybe we should just run through them. What do you think? Yeah, we could do that. What do you all think about that? Yeah. We can't hear that. Let's just start it as a, let's start it. We can always skip. Why don't we just start it as a presentation? If that would be okay. We'll just run the run the show and then we'll, you know, we can always say, oh, not that one or not that one. How do we organize this? We thought of some concurrent themes in our work. And we decided to show work that we've done from early until now on those themes and the first is anti-racism. And if we could have the first, well, slide number three, please. And this is a slide that we did in one year after we started doing provocative slides and posters. And it actually deals with a couple of issues, not only does it deal with how doubly difficult it is for black women to have commercial representation in the art world. And this was in 1986, 1985, 86. There was also a kind of tokenism at work too, because no, only one gallery showed more than one black woman. And we'll pick that up a little bit later in a campaign about tokenism and asking the question, is tokenism part of the problem or a continuation, I mean, is it a solution to the problem or a continuation of the problem? Okay, let's do the next slide. Can we go to the next, please? Number four. Just keep going in sequence. Let's just play the show and go in sequence, you know? Yeah. That's not, wasn't the next one. One back. Okay, so this is a really interesting example. This is also a very early poster of ours, a foundational poster at the beginning. It's a perfect example of how we craft our work. The Guerrilla Girls Forum to do street posters, and of course we've expanded way beyond that to do exhibitions and huge banners all over the world and all kinds of interventions and trouble-making and complaining wherever we go. But our idea still, also very early poster, is still to write a disruptive headline that's hopefully unforgettable or at least tells you something you never knew before and combine it with sometimes a killer visual or very heavy straightforward text that it's really easy to get the idea of in the hope of changing people's minds. So instead of saying there's too much racism and sexism in the art world, we had this headline when racism and sexism are no longer fashionable, what will your art collection be worth? We kind of use the strategies of advertising. And can you see the payoff? It's a list of all these incredible women artists of the past. And at that point, all these years ago, 1989, this is the subhead. The art market won't bestow megabuck prices on the work of a few white males forever. For the 17.7 million you just spent on a single Jasper Johns painting, you could have bought at least one work by all of these women and artists of color. And isn't that the point? These gatekeepers at museums would all collect the same white guys when there was a world of fantastic artists out there. And I know many of you are probably artists tonight, writers, creative people of all kinds. And the world of creative people is fantastic. But the gatekeepers suck. Okay, could we have the next one, please? Which is number five. This actually was a sort of an update of something we did in 2002. This update was in Minneapolis in 2016, in 2016, yes. And we wanted to deal a little bit with discrimination in Hollywood. And we decided that we would redo the Oscar and make him, the Oscar, the golden boy, looked a little bit like the people who won them. And here it is, the anatomically correct Oscar. His wife, like almost everyone who wins. And if you look at the Oscar, he's a little older, he's a little hudgy, he's balding. In any case, he isn't the beautiful, ideal Oscar that we see. He looks like the guys who win them. And of course, when we make an outrageous statement like that, we have to back it up with some information. And here it was, only 6% of the acting awards and 5% of the writing and directing awards have gone to people of color in 86 years. And what we found between 2003 and 2016 is that not much changed. And of course, this was during the Oscar's So White campaign. OK, next. So this one, OK, this is really interesting. It's about how we all work. The Gorilla Girls and everyone out there, no matter what you're doing, things suddenly come to you and it makes such a big difference. So we wanted to do a poster. We've always thought these commemorative months, February, Black History Month, March, Women's History, April, Asian American, Hispanic Heritage, LGBTQ, Disability Awareness, Native American History, those are great, great to celebrate. But what about the rest of the year? So we're designing this poster and we have all the text ready. And discrimination is such a long word. It just doesn't fit on the poster. How the hell are we going to do it and make it still seem big? And suddenly it was like light bulb. I we never thought before discrimination contains the word nation. And by breaking that into two lines, it makes all the difference. Discrimination. And I can't look at that word discrimination anymore without in my own mind breaking it into those two parts. Now, the next is a video. So let me say a little bit about it before you started. A lot of our members went to many of the Black Lives Matter demonstrations over the summer and we decided that we would do a very short video about it. And if you could start the video, please. It's number seven. Anisa, is there a problem? OK, here we are. There's no sound right now, so just let it go. The sound comes later. These were just all made from our little cell phone videos and photographs. And you can tell that in most cases, the person taking the image was a participant in the event. OK. Should we skip around a little bit? Well, sure. But otherwise, it'll take up, you know, so much time. You want to just talk more about things. But anyway, the first it the first image you saw was from 1986. And the last was from 2020. So you see how, of course, the problem of racism changes its tenor. But it is something that we dealt with from the very early times until now. And we keep chipping away. Our motto is do one thing if it doesn't work, do another if it does work, do another if it doesn't work, do another anyway. So where do you want to go now, Captain? Let's go to number 10, Venice. OK, the one just before that one to the. Well, we can do that one. OK, so, you know, the this is a giant banner we did in 2005 at the Venice Biennale, one of six giant, like 20 foot high banners that we had in the very first room of one of the big exhibition halls. And we put this in here because, again, you know, it's about it is an anti-sexist piece. And we researched 110 years of the Venice Biennales discrimination against women almost completely. And of course, that was 15, 16 years ago, and things have changed. But that was the first Biennale that had women directors. And they did have the most women ever. This was also really interesting because this is when, you know, we were just a bunch of ragtag artists in New York who would sneak around the streets in the middle of the night, putting stuff up. And after a while, the gallery, not galleries, but museums and art institutions like the Venice Biennale came a calling. And it was a dilemma for us at first. But then we realized the audiences for this kind of thing, like the Venice Biennale, huge audiences. And also when we're in exhibitions at museums or create exhibitions for museums, which we do now, was was a great audience to to have. And once you see our work, we kind of dare you to go into any museum and not think about what is being displayed here and why. OK, could we have the next one, please? Remember, 11. This is something we did for our 30th anniversary in 2015. We decided to go back and. This was 20, 20, not. Sorry, I'm sorry. Oh, that's right. OK, thank you. Girls are so bad at numbers. In 1999, we took a look at the U.S. Senate and compared it to Hollywood. And what we basically said is that the U.S. Senate or the Hollywood was worse than the U.S. Senate. The U.S. Senate is more progressive than Hollywood. And at the time, there were nine percent female senators, but only four percent female directors. So we went back to look at it again. And we found what did we discover? Well, Hollywood, you know, the Senate was still bad, but it had 25 percent female senators. And Hollywood was still just as bad. You know, Hollywood still sucked in four percent. So it's. You know, it's interesting to go back and look at these things and see how some things change and how some things don't change and to figure out a way to frame it. Of course, you know, you're having there more female senators, but would it be great if there were more female directors in Hollywood controlling or not controlling but generating the content that we see as film? All right, let's see. Let's skip a little bit here, too. Let's go to 15. Yep, that's the one. So this is the section on museum corruption and income inequality. And we've done big campaigns about about both of these things. But this particular work, which has been seen all over the world, basically, kind of distills our group ideas about these subjects. Don't let museums reduce art to the small number of artists who have won a popularity contest among big time dealers, curators and collectors. If museums don't show artists versus the cultures they claim to represent, tell them they're not showing the history of art. They are just preserving the history of wealth and power. And can I just have the next one because it shows this all over the place, right the next? Yeah, OK, so in this one, just to show how this plays out. And this is something we often do with our work. We have it in so many different places. You're looking on the top at LA. You're looking on the bottom right at Kochi, India. You're looking on the bottom. I mean, on the second from the left, Kochi, India. And on the far right bottom, you're looking at the Bangkok Biennale in Thailand. Could we go back to number 13? All of the talk now about the ethics of museums was something we were thinking about in the late 80s. So what we discovered is that there was no uniform code of ethics for art museums at the time. So we decided that we would write our own. And these were all situations that actually occurred in museums like thou shalt not be a museum trustee and also the chief stockholder of a major auction house. And all of these really referred to specific things that happened inside museums. And we decided that we would write it as a biblical, you know, as the Ten Commandments. Now, flash forward if you could go please to slide number 17. Last year, we decided that it was time to update it. And we started to look at the behavior of museums and museum trustees. We realized, thank you, that's it. A lot of things had not changed. So we designed this Gorilla Girls Code of Ethics for Art Museums as a traveling object, a plinth, a monument that could travel around. And here's how we imagine it in the courtyard of the Museum of Modern Art in the front of the appropriate sculpture of a woman about to fall into the water. If we could have the next one, please. I'll read a couple of the commandments. OK, great. Here it is. Thou shalt honor thy employees and pay all of them in living wage plus health insurance. It's kind of shocking that so few museums in the United States are unionized and that there are so many people working at barely a minimum wage or sort of independent contractors. And of course, they were the first people to go during the pandemic because the museums wouldn't think to cut their director salaries more than 10%. Anyway, this is something that is on our website. And I don't know, Katya, do you want to read another one? No, no, you go, and then I'll take up the next one. OK. Thou shalt not permit billionaires who sell deadly addictive drugs make tear gas deny climate change or undermine elections to art wash their reputations with huge donations to museums and to get their names on museum clauses. And of course, this refers to the Koch brothers. And since we did this two years ago, a lot of these trustees have been forced off the boards. And of course, the Sackler family has been super disgraced for their involvement in pushing drugs, basically. And our feeling is if we're stuck with this situation, the condition where the only way we can fund the culture is through philanthropy from the very rich. Well, the museums and the institution should at least choose donors and board members who make the world a better, not a worse place and not permit people who engage in very nefarious businesses to art wash their reputations by getting huge sums of money to museums. And I'm sure that if you look at the museums in San Francisco, you will find a lot of the same behavior. All right, okay, let's go to the title on 19. So I'm sure a lot of you have studied in school what they call the male gaze in art and culture, et cetera. Well, we've come to think of it as the male graze. And we've begun exploring the latitude that the art world gives to bad behavior of artists or filmmakers or writers, and also a lot of other aspects of it. So maybe I'll just start with one that really kind of shows this whole thing. Let's go to 23 before, the last, the one very before that. Okay, the Guerrilla Girls Song, we're in a big show a couple of years ago at the Hirshhorn Museum in D.C. And we had like just a couple of hours off, we were installing our work and all that stuff. So we went to the National Portrait Gallery because the portraits of Barack Obama and Michelle Obama had just gone up that day and it was very exciting in Trump America, there were just this incredible lines of people all really happy to be there and seeing this stuff. And after you see Barack Obama, you had to follow like a line. So the line takes you to a room in which there is this painting of Bill Clinton. And it was shocking to see that the portrait of Bill Clinton known sexual abuser was actually done. You can't make this stuff up by Chuck Close who also has multiple accusations of sexual harassment and abuse. So we got to thinking about this and we thought, you know, museums are facing a really hard time now in the Me Too era. They're trying to figure out what do you do about an artist with these issues in their sometimes in their work but often in their private life. And we imagine the meetings going on in all these museums where people are talking about it and trying to figure out. And we decided, you know, maybe we should figure out all these different things that they're working on and figure out what they should do. So next please, 24 please. Three ways to write a museum wall label when the artist is a sexual predator. So the first one is for museums afraid of alienating billionaire trustees and collectors who donated the artist's work. And the ups, I lost my picture here. I'll have to get it somewhere else, maybe. Let's see if I can find it. Oh yeah, I think it's coming up. Here it is. Here, we're getting there, we're getting there. There we go, yes. So in this one, okay, so here's the wall label. Chuck Close, American born in 1940, Monroe, Ohio. Portrait of President Bill Clinton, 1992, Oil on Canvas, National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C. Chuck Close is one of the most important artists of his generation and the creator of a new kind of portraiture, consisting of patterns of color. Then the next one is for museums conflicted about disclosing an artist's abuse next to his art. Chuck Close is one of the most important artists of his generation and the creator of a new kind of portraiture, consisting of patterns of color. Like many artists, he has had a few disgruntled employees. And the third one for museums who need help from the girls, Chuck Close has had a huge career with prices to match. He has been accused of sexually abusing models and students he picked up at fancy art schools. How fitting and ironic that he painted the official portrait of Bill Clinton. The art world tolerates abuse because it believes art is above it all and rules just don't apply to genius white male artists. Wrong. So we followed this up a little bit and let's go now to 26 and it's a video as well. And from this idea of the male grays, we decided to look through art history, Western art history to locate this kind of tradition, I would say or this recurring theme of sexual violence that's actually in the artwork itself. This is not to moralize about the artwork. These are all significant cultural products but to realize that sexual violence is almost implicit in our culture and certainly in the behavior of many men under a patriarchal system. But it's also expressed in the art world. So we're working on a project for this summer that will probably become a website and billboards in England. But here's a trailer that we wrote for it to sort of introduce it, the idea to the public. And if you could start it please. What do art historians call the macho hetero, predominantly white male perspective in European and American art that depicts women as sexual objects for the pleasure of male viewers? The male gaze. But the guerrilla girls call it the male graze. There are lots of naked women in post-colonial Western art sleeping in the backyard, splayed out on beds, lounging around with their friends, bathing, dancing, hooking up, being harassed, abducted, bound, raped and murdered. When we looked into how some revered male artists used and abused women in their real lives, we saw more than gazing, we saw grazing. So the question we wanna ask is, does life imitate art or art imitate life? Golgan abandoned his wife and five children to become primitive in the Caribbean and South Pacific. He married a secession of teenage girls as young as 13. He died of syphilis at 55 and probably gave it to many of them. European colonialism at its finest. Of the women who had long-term relationships with Picasso, two died by suicide, two had nervous breakdowns and one escaped and wrote about it. In 1950, sculptor Dorothy Daener decided her husband, sculptor David Smith, had hit her once too often. She loaded her pickup truck and took off for New York to start a career of her own. Smith turned around and married one of his young students. According to the book, Ninth Street Women, Hans Hoffman's summer school in Provincetown was a harem and Hoffman, the bull elephant who patted his female students on the ass and fucked everything that moved. Lucienne Freud admitted to having 14 children by 12 different women. He may have bothered twice as many. He said women go downhill at the age of 16. Sir Lawrence Gowing, principal of the slave school, pimped for Freud, admitting young girls to the art school who had caught Freud's eye. Chuck Close invited his female students from Yale to his studio to sit for portraits. The ones who refused to undress were given $100 and told to leave. The ones who stayed endured prime questions about their sex lives while posing naked. Get ready for the male grays. The guerrilla girls take on our culture's enduring love affair with bad male behavior and art. We're preparing a new project for the courtyard of Somerset House for Art Night 2021. We hope to see you there. It just might change the way you think about art forever. Okay, so Kotlin, do you think it's time for some questions? Yeah, I think that'd be great. Let's do it. Do you art the store? What? I think we have to dance that. Koreans called the macho. Heather? The next slide, 27, is a great collage of our many, many over 60 members over the years. Great, so that's a good backdrop for some questions. Okay, so Anissa, how should we handle this? Will you ask us the questions? I sure will, and I'm right here. So I have a great simple question to read out, maybe not simple for you to answer, but can you say more about your creative process? Well, you know, the Gorilla Girls were formed to, not to be a talking group, of course we've done a lot of talking, but it wasn't just to sit around and talk about things. It was to be an action group. And our action from the beginning was doing these posters, banners, you know, basically political art that went up on the streets or, you know, on the internet or in institutions. So we always focused on that. So there are a lot of subjects we haven't taken on because we've never been able to do something about them that we felt could break through in the culture and really possibly, possibly change people's minds. But we've done, you know, what Frida, like a hundred, 200 projects over the years, and we have kind of refined our critique and refined our techniques, but we always try to do something surprising and something that we hope is unforgettable. Okay, great. How about, I like this question. Love your work first off and then have the Gorilla Girls ever touched on issues of fat phobia within the art world mass media? You know, there are so many things that we haven't touched upon. It's not to say that we're not interested or involved or moved by them, but it's great to hear people bring up things that we still have to put on our to-do list. So sadly, we haven't done much about that, although we have certainly made a lot of fun of lookism and certainly lookism in the film industry, but I think that's something that really we need to deal with. So thank you for the suggestion and thank you for your patience because we will get to it. Could I just say one little thing? We do, we did write about this in, we have a book about female stereotypes and on the cover of that book, we have like a woman's back and on her back are written all these stereotypes and it's a Latinx woman who certainly is, I mean, I don't wanna use that word, but she is of that body type. How about one from YouTube, which is has the female art landscape changed a lot since you started in 1985? And if yes, also due to your efforts. Frida, you wanna take that? Well, some things have changed and other things have sort of popped up that we didn't expect. We certainly changed the consciousness of people thinking about art. When we started in 1985, it was not unusual for a museum director and I believe the director of the San Francisco Museum was very unapologetic and said he couldn't do anything for women artists because there hadn't really been very many. And there was an idea that there was a single strain of quality that everyone had to be measured against and no one realized that that was a white male standard and that things, the art that was admired and successful was usually art that was about male experience. And I don't think anyone would again say that you could write the history of art without the voices of women and artists of color. So that is a huge, seismic change, but the art will just change in other ways. It really has become an instrument of capitalism. It has been about money. It's become about collectors. And there's a huge glass ceiling for women and people of color in both the art market and also in the museum structure. Rarely do you see a woman rise to be a director although that's changing. And also there's a great deal of income inequality. If you compare the highest price paid for a living male artist work at auction compared to the highest price ever paid for a living, work by a living woman artist, you know what the percentage is? 14% when you compare the prices. So the woman gets 14 cents of a dollar. And we all know that that's far worse than you would find in the economy at large. So some things have gotten better and some things have gotten worse. Your work is obviously very data-driven and very beautiful visually as well. This person is curious if you're building any software as artists and they thank you for inspiring so many of us. Oh, you think we should have Guerrilla Girls Photoshop? So everything anyone does comes out like what our group does, I don't know. But we are very, computers definitely change the life of our beginning members. Of course, our current members grew up with computers the whole time. And it's certainly been a love affair because when we started out, it's hard to imagine this. There was no way to do a poster unless you had special skills. Now anybody can do it and they are. And it's the golden age of activism in that way. Everything you see is so in your face, so creative and so game-changing and mind-changing. And when we started out, unless you knew how to pay for, get type from a special foundry place, blah, blah, blah and prepare things in a super special way for printing, you couldn't be in that game. Now everybody is. But wouldn't it be fun to have like a program that people could put into their phones and when they go to a museum, they could count? Wouldn't that be cool? Or make comments on the artwork that, wow. Anyway, thanks for the idea. Another question. Yes, that was a great question. I have a fun question from the audience from the chat, which we are taking questions in the Q and A, so we're not coming back to the chat, but I do have a 10-year-old boy, his mom brought him, and he'd like to know if you ever take off your masks. Oh, well, we do take our masks off in our private lives, but the mask is really important because it depersonalizes the issue. The minute I take this mask off, you'll start looking at me and wondering who I am and what I've had and what I don't have, and personalizing the issues of racism and sexism, and in fact, they're institutional. And to depersonalize them allows us to consider the culture as something that has to change rather than just individuals. Early on, there was this word called empowerment, and it always annoyed me because it sort of implied that women and people of color need to empower themselves, that there was something they were lacking, they were lacking power, but in fact, it's the culture that needs to change. And until that changes, I'm not taking off this mask. But anyway, thank you for the question. Let's see, how about, here's one that I am not familiar with is, what do you think about NFTS? Are you familiar with that? Oh, I was, yeah. This is, I like to say what I think of it because I've been thinking about it a lot. What's wrong with the art world is art is so expensive. I mean, it's just ridiculously, ridiculously expensive. So it's mostly bought by hugely wealthy people and they're the ones who give their collection. They usually have all of the same art advisors. So they buy the same things and then they donate it to museums and museums all have the same cookie cutter collections of white guys. Well, now museums are trying to play catch up and cast a much wider net, but it's gonna take them a long time to overcome all the donors wanting to donate all their stuff and have pressure on them. So I think that this new thing is exactly like that. It's just creating another valuable instrument for rich people to trade. So the idea that something almost immediately went for $69 million, it's the same system. The only thing I like about the system is at this point anyway, it's different art. And I think that's definitely more democratic and more interesting. It's not just the usual suspects that everybody pays millions, that these few billionaires pay billions and billions for. But come on, can we have an art system that's not about making everything so valuable that it's inaccessible to people? Well, it's sort of inherent in the idea that art is an object that only one person can own and the idea that the person can have a digital image and pay a lot for it is kind of crazy. But I don't see it as an art issue. I see it as an economic issue. These super rich people are playing a kind of conspicuous consumption game to see who has the most money to buy something. It really isn't about culture, the production of significant and meaningful culture that will be there, it's a poker game. It's a poker game that you win if you have a lot of money. And I don't know, it'll be interesting to see how it takes off, but I see it as part of the art market. It's really not part of culture production. Well, a lot of it isn't about art though. I mean, all kinds of things are being traded and put big value on. It's not all art. Yeah, it's an unfungible whatever, they usually put other images. It's certificate, it's a thing that you could, like our work, one thing we like about our work is that it's not valuable at all. You can reproduce it hundreds of times, we can print hundreds of things. We sell posters on our website for 30 bucks and Matt, we're totally out of that market. We don't have to be in that world of preciousness because this is art for everybody and it's about changing minds and caring about what's going on in the world and trying, you know, your own tiny way to make trouble and also try to push that rock up the hill of more human rights for everybody. I mean, I think there's some art that produces knowledge and I think that what our work does is it produces knowledge, it's a form of knowledge. And, you know, everyone who has one of our posters or every museum that has a portfolio of our work has a piece of knowledge about a certain time, a certain situation and a way of dealing with it. So it's not about buying or owning a precious object, it's about, it's like owning a good book or listening to, you know, having a CD of music. It's knowledge, it's not a precious object. You know, and the most satisfaction that people in our group get really is the fact that people care about this all over the world but it's not like they just care about what we're doing. They want to do it too and people are doing it all over the world. Thank you. I'm going to combine a couple of questions here. There is quite a few folks who want to one, know how to become a gorilla girl and how many members you have and how diverse it is and if you have any male members and does one have to be an artist to become a gorilla girl. So Katya, do you want to jump on to that? Well, let me just tell you, you know, so we are a 36 year old group as of May, 2021 and overall that time, you know, over 60 individuals have been members of the gorilla girls. Our secret is that we have to be small at any one time because you can't do the kind of work we do, the huge group. You could never get 100 people to agree but 60 people, 60 plus, some stay for months, some for decades, you know, a few just for a single meeting and we have been diverse. We're cis, lesbian, transgender, diverse in age, sexual orientation, class and for many different backgrounds, African American, South Asian, Asian, European, Latinx, so on and so on. And each of us takes the name of a dead woman artist as a pseudonym and often people take the name of somebody they admire and they've researched and maybe didn't even know about before they joined the gorilla girls. And Frida, you want to talk about the... How to become a gorilla girl? Okay, good news or bad news? Let's see, let's try the bad news first. The bad news is I'm really sorry it's hard for us to take new members. If we considered everyone who wanted to be a gorilla girl, we would be an employment agency. We would be people constantly, we'd get no work done. But the good news is you don't need to be a gorilla girl to do the kind of work that we do. We say use us as a model from your own group that is involved with issues in your own neighborhood, in your own world, in your own time. And just do it, the world needs more than one group of feminist masked avengers. Thank you. Let's see, how about there was one about how do you choose your venues? Well, they don't mean our target. First of all, thank you everyone for these questions, they're great. Venues are targets. So venues often choose us. You know, that happened to us over the years. We still do whatever we want and we do a campaign that we want to do. But we do get lots of requests from community organizations to major museums all over the world for us to come and speak, for us to do exhibitions and for us to do special projects sometimes even examining a museum itself. And then they put all the bad news up right inside the museum. In terms of targets, I think we all have our favorite things that we kind of go back to again and again. And the topics you saw tonight are the topics that we deal with. But things just come, I mean, we just work as artists. Like you'll read something and you'll have an idea, you bring it to the group and someone says, well, maybe this, maybe that. And you whip it around in a blender and turn it into something that's better than one person could ever have thought of themselves. But you know, there is a kind of zeitgeist too that I think we tap into. And right now, we're particularly interested in museum corruption. And it started way back in the 80s, but it surfaced a few years ago. And now during the pandemic, it's even come to the forefront. And there's so many groups that have been formed by people working in museums. And we've been particularly interested in the ethical standards of the boards of directors of museums. And we've been particularly focusing on one individual whose name is Leon Black. Leon Black is the head of the board of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He also is the owner of Fide & Impress. And the interesting thing is when we first started looking around for a publisher for the art of the game badly, Fide & Impress approached us and we thought, this is great, they did beautiful books. But a year into the production of the book, it was almost finished, it came out that Leon Black had a long and unexplained relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. And at that point, we realized, yes, Fide & Impress is a great press, but we could not be tainted. Our book could not be tainted forever by a connection to Leon Black. And this was in 2019. We saw the writing on the wall when he was upskating, not answering questions. He kind of was made of Teflon. He was able to dodge every accusation. We got into an argument with the head of Fide & Impress who sort of said, well, you're the only artist who's complaining about it as though we should be embarrassed or ashamed. And I said, well, we've been the first to complain about a lot of things. So we brought that contract and we were very happy with Chronicle. Chronicle did the book. And now as things are coming out just in the last few months, it came out that Leon Black gave $200 million to Jeffrey Epstein for allegedly tax advice. But they're digging deeper, deeper, deeper into it. And he has had to resign from his hedge fund. And it's so interesting that the Museum of Modern Art has not yet asked him to leave the board of directors and that the financial institution had to act on their ethics before the Museum of Modern Art. But just hold on to your seatbelts. I think it's gonna come. And I think that's going to enable and empower a lot of activists to start criticizing the composition of what art museums run for. Yes, they are nonprofit organizations but most of them were privately owned. And when they have art collectors sit on the board of directors, that really is a conflict of interest because it means they can use the Museum to enhance the value of their own art collections. And if you start to look at the boards of museums, very rarely do you find any art experts on the boards. They're all people who do the Museum money. And isn't there a better way to do things? Can museums really represent the culture at large rather than the wealthy class? So I think we were ahead of the game on that. And I'm delighted to see things developing as they are. And I just can't wait to see what's gonna happen in the next six months. You know, just I'm sure you all know this, but we have a horrible system in this country. Museums have no money. They have to rely on these billionaires to buy art for them. I mean, curators, if they wanna buy something, they often call one of these people on the board and say, hey, I want this and maybe they'll pay for it and maybe they won't. In Europe, you know, every system has its faults, but in Europe museums are, and it's changing a little in Europe now, are government funded. So they're not beholden to these, the money people in the same way that museums are here. They're in a really tough place. But they're also in a tough place because instead of buying, instead of casting the wide net and really collecting the story of our culture, they're buying the million dollar painting and then the 10 million dollar painting. And you can't get a lot of stuff. You need a lot of money to buy one thing when you could still buy hundreds of things by fantastic artists. Thank you. There are so many questions out here. We are gonna, you know, get close to wrapping it up. But again, the data came up and we all love your data out here, it seems. Do you have any favorite data dives that you use to get your statistics and all of your info? You don't want to tell them Frida that we make it all up, do you? Well, you know, early on, it was not so easy before the internet to find out things like the auction prices for works at auction, very hard to find. Museum collections were very hard to count. Now that there's the internet, it's a whole lot easier. So we really go, we go after data when we want to prove something. We are statisticians, we don't keep data banks. We don't go back to the Metropolitan Museum every six months to see if there are more naked women and more women artists and more naked men in the artworks. So, you know, if you look at our statistics, they're pretty straightforward, really straightforward. We didn't have a database until, what, 2017, 16, no, 2016 when we did a project at the Whitechapel Gallery where we- Well, that wasn't a database, we sent questionnaires to museums. Yes, but we made a database. Scientific. We made a database of all that information, but we haven't had a database before. That was the very first one and it was kind of magical. Same thing with data though. I mean, data is what you do with it and what your idea is to find. So when we had the idea to count the number of women artists, work by women artists hanging in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York compared to naked females, that made a point that could never have been made if we just said, just counted the women. So we're not the people who just do the counts of that sort of thing. We rely on a lot of fantastic researchers who do do those counts. And it's just amazing to see the kind of data that comes out about the art world now. You know, if you wanna find out the highest price, you know, ever paid for an artwork, all you need to do is ask the internet and kaboom, up it comes. So, you know, it's just an amazing time to be able to data dive. Maybe one more question? Yes, for sure. So I was just, you know, there are, there's like over, you know, 75 questions tonight. So that's amazing. Thank you all. And I just wanna mention lots of people are throwing stuff up in the chat. If you click to the right under the three dots, you can save the chat. There's lots of links, including what an NFTS is. But I have one more, and this is, let's see, I'm a 60 year, I'm 60 years old. I remember lying on one of your first posters about the advantages of being a female artist. We can change the style or medium we work in without upsetting our gallery or collectors, something like that. It still makes me laugh, especially as I toil as an unknown artist, try a new art medium or genre. And a big thank you to the Gorilla Girls from this person. Actually, I think the line is, whatever kind of work you do, it will be labeled final. All right, friends, I think we're gonna go, let's find one more juicy question because that wasn't quite a question. Let's see, let's see. Besides large museums like MoMA, have you ever targeted other art institutions, smaller galleries, art schools, et cetera, or do you prefer to stick to larger and more powerful or influential institutions? Well, we love to go after the big fish for sure, but we've done things about so many institutions all over the world. I mean, we've looked at the collection of the museum Ludwig and Cologne of the Minneapolis Institute of Art in Minneapolis and lots of much smaller places. And we've helped students do their own kind of research and counting in different places too. So this is a really important part of our practice. Often someone will set us off, they'll tell us something about a place that is pretty egregious and we'll look into it and often make something out of it. And this project where we sent 400 questionnaires out to museums and art institutions all over Europe and made an exhibition out of their replies. The questionnaire was all about diversity and the museums all said, oh yes, we care about this so much. But then when you looked at their collections, it was totally untrue. So our exhibition showed that very clearly and a lot of people didn't reply to the questionnaire. So we took all the names of the institutions who didn't even have the guts to send it back and we put their names on the floor of the exhibition so people could walk on them. We did a project for the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. It was kind of funny because we were contacted by the Education Department and they were having an exhibition of Dutch teachers who studied in Paris over two centuries. And there was only one woman selected for the show. Meanwhile, there were dozens of women who were in that category. So the Education Department and oftentimes the Education Departments are the most progressive departments inside museums and that's probably why they're the first ones who get sacked during the pandemic. The Education Department came to us and said, please, can you do something about this for us as an educational department program that will be shown at the opening? And it was great to do it. And if you go to our website, you'll see it. It's titled One Is Not Enough. And I think that it left a little bit of tension between the Curatorial Department and the Education Department. But of course, that's the kind of dialogue that really has to happen inside institutions. They have to feel a little uncomfortable about what they're doing so that they can actually represent the real time that they're living in. Not some crazy made up, imaginative time about the past. And of course, the Van Gogh Museum is one great big museum about crazy white male genius and how that becomes a modern stereotype for what's expected of a male artist. Now, if a woman behaved like, and had a life like Van Gogh, she would have been institutionalized a lot earlier than few of us. You know, all of this stuff is in our book. When we were conceiving this book, we thought, you know, you're not supposed to put in a book, your other books that you've written. You're not supposed to put in videos. And we thought, screw that, we need to put in the whole body, the whole body of this work. So there are 400 images and it includes the Van Gogh piece that Frida was talking about and a lot of other museum interventions. And also, of course, you can always see all of this on our website too. Yeah, I mean, if you buy the book, you can, you have it all the time and you can sleep with it. But if you go to our website, you can see a lot of the videos that of course, and it's very hard to choose a video in a book. So thank you so much for coming and, you know, please do good work, be active, don't ask anyone's permission to complain. You can be a professional complainer like we are. Thank you. Thank you so much, everybody. And we appreciate you all being here tonight. And please go buy the book. You can check off the book from our library as well. The e-book is really amazing because you can really pull up the vibrant images and hone in on those little statements that you have throughout the book. And I mean, really, checkmark in my career Thank you so much, Gorilla Girls, for being here. Amazing. And the questions are off the hook tonight. So thank you all. And I'm so sorry we couldn't get to every single one. Thank you. Thank you all. All right. Good night, friends. We'll see you next time.