 Girls begin to talk and stand on their feet sooner than boys, because weeds grow more quickly than good crops. Martin Luther, 1533. I consider women liars, writers, and politicians as monsters, and nothing but five-legged calves. The woman artist is merely ridiculous. But I am in favor of the female singer and dancer, a ghostry guard, beloved impressionist painter. Dear group of communists, you're the strongest bunch of bitches ever seen in world art. Don't think to career you will make at 80. Best work of art a woman can make is in bed making well-loved and maybe procreate non-idiot females. Feminism is reason for high number of AIDS subsistence. Thank to you, bitch feminist, if weakest men become gay and AIDS raise up in USA, a woman can be genius. Do you remember the holy virgin you damn bunch of whores? Answer me if you have the courage, bunch of bitches. It's a letter to the guerrilla girls from an Italian art critic. Dear G.G.s, once I asked the slugger, Hank Aaron, who had just broken Babe Ruth's career home run record, just how good Aaron thought the babe was. He shrugged. For him, it was an irrelevant question. The babe hadn't played against her great African-American athletes banned from the major leagues. How can you look at old time baseball with only white men playing? How can you look at art with only white men hanging? So thanks, guerrilla girls. There's no way in the world I can ever again begin to listen to professors and experts and curators and salespeople hustlingly eschewed, segregated art game. Robert Lipsite, New York Times sports columnist. OK, so as you know, I'm Cosy Colomitz. This is Frida Paolo. We're two of the founding members of the guerrilla girls and have been involved in pretty much almost everything the groups have done over the years. And with me today, of course, is Gertrude Stein, who's another founding member of the guerrilla girls, who has now is involved with a group guerrilla girls broadband, which she's going to tell you about in a second. And Alice Neal, a former member, long, long time important member who's gone on now to do other things in her art career. Now, the guerrilla girls are a group of anonymous women artists. And as Mara explained, we use facts, humor, and a little bit of fake fur to expose sexism and racism and corruption in the art world. We don't do posters that, like a lot of political art, point to something and say, this is bad. We in fact try to twist an issue around and make people laugh at it and present it in some way it hasn't been seen before, to give people a chance to really rethink it. We wear guerrilla girls in public, and we take the names of dead women artists as pseudonyms. This anonymity keeps the focus on the issues and away from our personalities. Many, many women have been members of our group over the years, and we've been diverse in ethnicity, sexual orientation, age, and also level of our world success. Our work is passed around the world by our tireless supporters, and we are taught in many schools and universities. We get thousands of letters every year on our website for roadgirls.com. We could be anyone we are everywhere. So, God, we've done so many posters, stickers, billboards, lots of other projects. We've written several books, including guerrilla girls' bedside companion to the history of Western art. Bitches, thank you, that's great. Bitches, bimbos, and ball breakers, the guerrilla girls' illustrated guide to female stereotypes, and the guerrilla girls' art museum activity book. We have a website, which we love you all to visit, and we've shown up in so many different things, including The New York Times, The London Times, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, and Bitch, and NPR, CNN, and the BBC. Just in the last few years, we've appeared at over 90 universities and museums around the world, including MoMA, as Maura mentioned before, and the Tate Modern, where a whole room of our posters is on display. We also created large-scale installations for Venice, Rotterdam, Mexico City, Bilbao, Sarajevo, Istanbul, Athens. And just a few weeks ago, posters of ours were carried around the streets of Shanghai at the Shanghai contemporary art fair. One of our goals has always been to change people's minds about that F word, feminism. We believe that feminism is a way of looking at the world, and perhaps it will be a way to save the entire world. We think it's ridiculous that feminism has been demonized in the media for so long that many people who actually believe in the tenets of feminism equal opportunity, equal pay for work, human rights for women worldwide, including right to an education, still do not consider themselves feminists. When the girl started out in 1985 sneaking around the streets of New York, putting up posters in the middle of the night, posters that told the truth about the status of women in the New York art world. By the way, here's one of our early posters on a mailbox. I'm putting a poster on a mail box as a federal offense. We did it because we were pissed off, but the posters caught everyone's attention and really started people talking about the issues. And just to be clear, we weren't complaining because there wasn't 50% this, 13% this, 40% this. This is how pathetically, pathetically low the numbers in the art world work. Now, a few years after those first posters, we were asked to design a billboard that would be around Manhattan in various places. And we thought it would be a great opportunity to try out this crazy voice that we had developed that had been successfully provocative on a larger audience. So one Sunday morning, we went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to conduct what we have affectionately come to call the weenie count. Some of you know what the weenie count was? We counted naked males and naked females in the artworks. So when we went through the classical art section to our great surprise, almost all of the naked figures were male. It was only when we arrived in the 19th and 20th century sections that early modern era when sex replaces religion as the major preoccupation for European artists did we get this statistic. You know, artwork has made a big difference in the art world, we hope, but all habits die hard and some museums still lay behind. We went back to the Met two years ago to see if anything had gotten any better. We were sure that it had, but this is what we found. Women artists put more naked males. Is this progress? Recently, the gorilla girls have been faced by a really big dilemma. What do you do when the system you've spent your lives attacking suddenly embraces you? In 2005, we were asked to do a big installation in the Venice Biennale, and in the last couple of years, our work has been seen at major museums all over the world. So what is a girl activist to do? This is something we've really agonized over, but we've always made a decision in the whole time of gorilla girls to kind of try to get the message out to as large an audience as possible. So for now, we've decided to go along with these exhibitions and appearances at museums. Also, we have to admit it's a thrill to criticize these institutions on their own walls, and it's also really necessary to criticize them on their own walls. Here's what we did in Venice. We did an installation of six 17-foot tall posters that were the first things that viewers saw when they entered the Arsenaale. We took on the Biennale itself, documenting 110 years of discrimination. But we also declared it the first feminist Biennale. Why? Well, as Mara said, it had the first female directors in the history of the Biennale. And, surprise, it had the highest number of women artists shown ever. We also took on the museums of Venice. We discovered that every historical museum in Venice, except one, did have work by women artists in their collection, but almost all of it was kept in the basements, and not shown on the walls of museums. So we appropriated this iconic image of Marcello Mastriani straddling Anita Eckberg from the famous Fellini film, La Dolce Vida. And we declared that women, or that viewers everywhere, should go to the museums of Venice and demand them to put women on top. A few months ago, the Washington Post newspaper gave us a full page as part of a special section on feminism and art. So we designed our own tabloid called Not OK, the Guerrilla Girls Scandal Rag. And it reveals the shocking truth about the low, low number of women in our taxpayers-supported and national museums. For instance, when we did the research, we found that at the National Gallery, there was not one single work by an African-American artist, female or male, hanging at the museum at that moment, which is pretty unbelievable. For our tabloid, we also had the post-Bioce picture of Brad and Angelina, because no tabloid is complete without them. And the caption we put under them says, select, say, museums must adopt new policies. Just shows you how pathetic the statistics were at our national museums, National Guerrilla of Art. These are art on view at that moment a few months ago. National Gallery of Art, 98% male, 99% white. National Portrait Gallery, 93, 99. Hershore, 95, 94. American Art Museum, 88, 91. Now, all the National Gallery to fact-check the museum were bananas. And it hurriedly installed the last minute, a sculpture by an artist of color. And the Hershore had suddenly found work by women and artists of color it never knew. In fact, after the post-article came out, a group of more than 20 women curators at the National Gallery organized themselves, anointed themselves the gallery girls, and vowed to increase the number of women artists in the gallery. Curators of conscience everywhere. Make sure that your museum is not just telling the white male version of art history. You know, there's an area of US culture that's, believe it or not, even worse than the art world, and that is Hollywood. The film industry loves to think of itself as edgy, progressive, and ahead of the curve. But if you look behind the scenes at the numbers of women and people of color in positions of power as directors, writers, editors, cinematographers, you find a really, really, really low number. So for several years now, we've been renting billboards in Hollywood just right at the time of the Oscars and just a few blocks away from where the ceremonies are held. And for our very first one in 2002, we put a little realism into the Academy Awards and redesigned the Golden Boy to look more like the guys who take them on. The anatomically correct Oscar. His white male, just like the guys who win. Now, we have to back up this outrageous statement with some facts, and here they are. Best Director has never been awarded to a woman. 94% of the writing awards have gone to men. Only 3% of the acting awards have been given to actors and actresses of color. And now, that was the very year that both Denzel Washington and Halle Berry won an Oscars for their performances. And we are convinced it was because of our billboard. Now, this past year, Jennifer Hudson became the fourth African-American woman in 79 years to win an Oscar, and Boris Whitaker became the sixth African-American man to win. And of course, we take credit for that too. And here's our most recent billboard. You know, Hollywood producers have come to us several times and they say, Gorilla Girls, we want to make a film about the history of 60s and 70s feminism. And they say, we'd love to hear your ideas. Well, usually, as soon as we tell them the ideas, we never hear from them again. But one day, we were sitting around thinking, what if Hollywood did make a film about the history of 70s feminism? And the minute that idea flew into our heads, another idea flew right behind it. Maybe we're lucky that Hollywood hasn't made that film. So we decided to create the movie poster for the film we hope never gets made, The Hollywood Way. We're still this feminist leader, Gloria Steinem. We have Halle Berry as civil rights leader, Flo Kennedy. And we have Councilor Zeta Jones as congresswoman, Bella Axel. Of course, our tagline, they made women's rights look good or really good. Now, those of you in the audience who have studied the 70s feminist movement, and those of you in the audience who are part of the 70s feminist movement, will see right away that we have tried to be really historically accurate in our film. And you will remember from your studies of your experience that the great feminist leaders did wear bikinis 90% of the time. You made it a Jerry Brokheimer production directed by Oliver Stone and get the soundtrack out by Eminem. Now for some pure politics. We've focused on art and film stuff today, but we've also done a lot of posters about politics and social issues. In the last few years, everyone has been asking us what we are doing to help our country's efforts to fight terrorism and win the war in Iraq. First, we must tell you, we think this war needs an entirely new weapon. And we have proposed one to the Department of Defense. Here it is. It is the estrogen bomb. Now, how does an estrogen bomb work? You drop it on Washington. And all the guys in government throw down their guns. They hug each other. They apologize. I'm sorry. No, I'm sorry. It was all my fault. It was all my fault. Then, finally, they start to work on human rights, education, healthcare, and an end to world poverty. Got leftover estrogen pills out there in the audience? Send them to George Bush, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, D.C. Okay, so what are some of the things we would like you to take from all this? Well, first of all, change doesn't just happen. You have to fight for it. Second, we would like everyone to invent their own crazy way of being an activist, just like we did. And their own way of being an artist. And while you're at it, their own way of being a feminist, too. So I have a few questions that I wanted to ask the real girls. I think the one that seems the most obvious one, and I think you'd probably love to hear about, is, what was the spark that sort of caused them to begin, you know? 1984, 85, and it was almost 25 years ago, that they formed as a group. So I want to hear from them the history of their formation. So I hope they can tell us a little bit about that. Well, in 1985, Museum of Modern Art opened after several renovations ago. They reopened with an exhibition that was called an International Survey of Painting and Sculpture. It was supposed to be the last word of what's going on in the contemporary art world around the world. There were a little fewer than 200 artists in the show, and only 17 women. The stats were bad enough, but then the curator of the show said in the press, and he will go unnamed. He may be out in the audience today. Anyone who wasn't in, he said, anyone who's not in my show should rethink his career. Now, that was pretty damning. So a number of us went up to the Museum of Modern Art and protested with placards and chants and banners in a very traditional kind of way. And at the end of the day, we made absolutely no progress. Everyone going into the museum argued with us. So we decided that it was really time to invent some new strategies to make people take this issue seriously. And basically, we got a group of, a small group of women together, and we came into the group with the idea of putting two posters up on the street and very quickly sat down and did the research. The idea was to make artists and galleries start feeling guilty about the low, low, low numbers. So the first one said, these artists allow their work to be shown in galleries. They don't show women. They show 10%, you know. And then the other one was these galleries show less than 10% women and none at all. They were all a list of, you know, the top artists of the day and the top galleries of the day. And we remained anonymous because then we could make names. We could finger the galleries and finger the reserves. And that's what caused a big stir on the street because we put up these two posters and all hell broke loose. And things per se were... Putting up the posters was an experience too. I don't think it worked out during that because we were in masks, middle of the night, with the glue, with the buckets, with the room, we'd get chased by the cops. Please, we'd come out after us and we'd have to run from different places. It was fun because you could put them up on a Friday night and then hang out around the posters on Saturday afternoon when everyone was at the galleries. And we got lots of great ideas just from the interaction people had, you know, to the posters. So we sat down and actually, the statistics, we decided these statistics is just black and white, it was shocking to us the actual homework, it was homework. Just sat down and went to the magazines, numbered, counted, and recorded everything and there was so many things that we came up with. And how did you do that sort of pre-internet? You know, did you go and look at the archives that say, for the gig in Hyde, and it's very easy now. I recently did a lot of research for the Global Feminism's Catalog and it was very simple. I just went and went on the Tate archives and could look back and look at the appalling results of how many women are in sixth division. Our secret research tool for years was the Art in America annual. It came out once a year and it had everything you needed. Every gallery just so proudly displayed a list of artists. Well, we just get down the list and we have these five minute research projects. We said, if it takes more than five minutes to get the research, we're not gonna do it because that's how fast it is. But we have models all over the place too. Always have and always will. Give us information. And now, you know, a lot of these institutions are playing catch up and trying to count again. The Museum of Modern Art had no idea how many women were in its collection. I mean, if you went to the museum, you could see probably none, you know, there's hardly any, but they have just begun a project to try to identify them. The numbers are really low, especially since they are a modern and contemporary museum. Give us an intuitive feeling that something was not right. We all felt that for a long time and we didn't really know how to crack or do it. So we did it that way when we sat down just with the information. It was shocking to everybody. So there was the answer right there on how to start to approach this. And we went after, you know, first artist galleries, critics, collectors, museums. You know, we went after one group after another. And it wasn't long after that that we started thinking about, hey, we could use this kind of in-your-face, you know, humorous way of talking about things in other fields. Many of us were activists in the world as well as artists and we wanted to be activists in the art world. So we started right away by doing it at worm fosters, social issues. The Gulf War. What? The Gulf War. Yeah. We looked at the statistics. The rules that you get as a woman in the Gulf War, it's like the South in 1960. So it was a real way of combining our own life, our own personal lives as artists. You know, really combining what's in us being in the world and how it affected us as artists. We were really operating in an atmosphere of total disbelief. You know, everyone wanted to think that the art world was a very liberal open place and that it was ahead of the rest of the world. It was sort of avant-garde. But every time we did the figures, we realized that the world of culture of art was derriere. It was backward in the way it treated women and artists of color. But everyone in the art world had this superior attitude that, oh, you know, there can't be any sexism or racism, conscious or unconscious in the way we see things. But we did get actually some apology letters from critics and curators who said, thank you for making me think about what I do and I'm gonna try hard better. Well, it's so sort of institutionally, you know, it's so insidiously unconscious, you know, that I don't think people really think about it and I think that's what you're helping to make clear. But the question I was gonna have was, you know, do you think that the things have changed? And if so, in what ways? I mean, obviously permanent collections are still not, you know, really, really that great. I mean, you know, it's Jerry Solitz recently who did that wonderful article about the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art after the reinstallation and talked about how it was like four percent women or something more on display. It was appalling, you know, he's been a great sort of male feminist art critic, kind of really doing some guerrilla work for us, you know. But so where do you think things have improved and where haven't they? What sort of work do we still have to do? Well, you know, like any situation, any civil rights struggle, there are advances and there are setbacks. And what we found now is that it's a no-brainer. You can't have a collection or a survey or an exhibition that purports to be broad without the work of women or artists of color. But it's just, it's not possible. And you can't have an art collection that really talks about a culture without the voices of everyone in the culture. That's fine. So at the entry level and at the survey level, things are getting better. But there's a crushing, crushing glass ceiling for women and artists of color as you go up that kind of ladder. And if you look at auction results, and the auctions are this month. So take a look and see how many women artists and artists of color ever come up with an auction and whether there were sales for what white male art sells for. Look at museum retrospectives. Look at monographs. See if women and artists of color really are seen as often at that level of professional success. They certainly don't get the money. And your money in many ways is production. So if, you know, it changes, it gets better in some ways and worse in others. But bringing it to light the consciousness of it. I didn't think anybody could look back now and show that it's free to say and not be aware of the count. What's there and what's not there. And that's a big difference. And the more artists of color and show and what's more collectors become women and the more diversity of the collectors and the curators and your position, which helps to, you know, that opens up the idea that there's more than one way to see something and there's more than one experience. Well it really needs to begin, as you said, on the entry level and on the foundational level. And so what advice do we give to even people like collectors who will in turn, you know, sensibly give their collections to the museum or, I mean, so again, on the foundational level, like a collector or, you know, again, museums with their collection policies or their permanent exhibition displays and their exhibition programs or public programs, et cetera, on the foundational level. What advice would you give to collectors and to museums to make these broader institutional changes, you know? It's a bargain. It's a bargain. It's a bargain. It's a bargain. It's a bargain. It's a bargain. It's a bargain. It's a bargain. It's a bargain. It's a bargain. It's a bargain. Definitely. Well, I mean, it's really problematic how, you know, art museums are so dependent on collectors who are oftentimes art investors. And it's really about dollars and cents and money and seeing things in terms of its monetary value in the world is a lousy way, a lousy way to collect our historical, you know, artifacts. There has to be something else. I mean, if literature were taught that way, they'd only be teaching the best selling Jacqueline Suzanne in literary classes. You know, really. So maybe there needs to be another, there needs to be a cutoff. Collectors are fine. Why do they have so much influence in museums? Well, also, it's a very dire time in the art world right now because art is selling for so much money, maybe not after this week, but the stock market, latest stock market plunges. But art is selling for so much money that museums have a hard time buying it because they can't afford it. So they need the collectors to give them the money to buy it. And most collectors just make cookie cutter collections of the greatest hits. You know, they have advisors who tell them what to do. So I would say to any of you out there who are collectors, have an individual collection. You know, have a mind of your own. Don't just consider the art world in Olympics and collect the five people who someone tells you are the winners. You know, 100 years from now, we don't want to come to, if we were alive on this, looking down on the ceiling or something 100 years ago, and we went through the Brooklyn Museum, we don't want the museum to have collected all the wrong stuff. We want to see a real picture of our country. Yeah, it's a dilemma because the change does come within. You know, I mean all you can do is put out the message and put the seed and think about it. But to really make shifts, that's an individual decision, a journey. And but the, it would be nice to see the collectors who come back who really collect from the gut. You know, not just from the wallet or what someone else can take it to have. I think that's been lost for a while. There were those collectors, and now I think maybe it's starting to come back and that might help, too. Maybe artists should make art that can't be bought, that can be owned by many, many people. Oh, we saw that, we've all tried that. Look, you know, our posters are cheap. We never, our posters, our books are cheap, you know. You want to know for us, you got 20 bucks, you know. We've answered the question about collectors, but I mean, we still need to discuss museums. To me, clearly, you know, I think the Berklee Museum has made a great effort here with developing the first center for them in Stard. But, you know, I think also there have been great initiatives by like, you know, the Tate Modern, or I think the Tate General. In March of 2006, they declared, I don't know if they've yet to, you know, make this happen, but they will make a huge initiative to flush out their collection of women artists because they recognize that it was really sort of protestically low. And also the Moderna Museum in Stockholm, I think within a month or two of that declaration by the Tate also made a similar, you know, public initiative. So there are, I think that, I mean, these are moves in the right direction. Those are initiatives. So, I mean, what other kind of, is there anything else sort of that, I mean, these are obviously wonderful, wonderful cultures, but. Well, it's all connected, too. You know, what's shown is what the critics write about, which hence gets visualized and exposed and the collectors will buy from. So it's all, they're all interconnected. Then that gets taught in schools and then the cycle is perpetuated. Yeah. But again, it's a level of consciousness that is perpetually over and over again. Yeah. That people really need to recognize. Right. They can't make anyone really change. It's an inner. Yeah. The despair. Oh, yes. Well, we can't, shame. Shame. Thank you. Very important. Thank you. Thank you.