Date back to 1985, multiple black and white fact-sheets posters were popping up on the higgledy-piggledy streets of New York City, calling attention to disproportionate representation in the art world and wage inequality. The wheat-pasting provocative campaign posters around New York City in 1985 was a concrete cornerstone of the feminism art project named ‘Guerrilla Girls’, embarking the golden ‘renaissance’ of female artists, curators.
‘Guerrilla Girls’, accordingly, is reckoned on as an anonymous collective of female artists relentlessly devoted to tamping down sexism and racism within the art community. The Guerrilla Girls was shaped in New York City in 1985 with the onefold obligation of bringing gender and racial inequality into focus within the greater arts community. The group opts for employing culture jamming in the form of posters, books, billboards, and public appearances to the extent that upend the art world’s norm. To be more inclusive and to make their posters more eye-catching, fact-driven, the Guerrilla Girls tend to blend facts with humorous images. Furthermore, resonating with the vicissitude of life that the victims of gender discrepancy persevere, Guerrilla Girls’ artworks also portray the suffering that female artists endure in the horrendously toxic art workplaces and arouse compassion that word alone can not. Subsequently, to conceal identities, Guerrilla Girls members are inclined to cover their face with signature gorilla masks and use aliases that refer to deceased female artists when protesting or fly-posting their posters.
After three decades as masked crusaders for gender and racial equality in the artwork, the Guerrilla Girls have lately been enjoying their big-footed leaps across the cultural world and still rattling art world cages. Throughout their existence, they have exhibited, shared work in separate places and lectures at colleges, where their campaigns are part of women’s studies and art history classes. Furthermore, numerous institutions have taken part in Guerrilla Girls and acquired the group’s portfolio of posters and ephemera, documenting the number of women and minorities represented in galleries and institutions. Case in point, in 2014, the Guerrilla Girls have also teamed up with Amnesty International, contributing pieces to a show under the organization's "Protect the Human'' initiative.
Despite being critically acclaimed and having routinely challenged art institutions to display more artists of color, the Guerrilla Girls still stirs up controversy by its internal mechanism. It is known that Guerrilla Girls members strive forward creating a non-hierarchical, equitable power structure. Howbeit, there was an increasing sense that two powerful figures were making "the final decisions no matter what you said." Therefore, some members condemned the group as an "undemocratic organization”.
Notwithstanding various ‘ripen with theatre’ facts stewed by the group, it can be argued that the Guerrilla Girls are well on the path to fulfilling their cultural purpose of building a more socially-aware society.