Guerrilla Girl to Speak at SAIC Commencement

This Saturday, May 22nd, at 10:30am thousands will gather at the Millennium Park Pritzker Pavillion for the School of the Art Institute’s 2010 Commencement Ceremony. In recent years, commencement speakers for the prestigious art school have included world-renowned Italian architect Renzo Piano, New York Magazine and Village Voice art critic Jerry Saltz, and Chilean-born installation artist Alfredo Jaar. This year’s speaker: the Guerrilla’s Girls’ Käthe Kollowitz.  
 
Known for their flamboyant and fun but hard-hitting works of institutional critique, a representative of the Guerrilla Girls as the commencement speaker seems to be a creative choice. The group began in 1985 after An International Survey of Painting and Sculpture opened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the curator, Kynaston McShine, made a public statement that any artists not included in the exhibition—all 169 of which were white artists and only 13 women—should “rethink ‘his’ career.” After doing some research the Guerrilla Girls discovered that this sort of oblivious sexism and racism in the art world was far from atypical, and, while female artists and artists of color had had some success in the seventies, progress by 1985 seemed to be backtracking. The group of self-identified women artists began to put together witty, bright colored posters and pamphlets to distribute around the New York art scene, drawing awareness through the combination of aesthetics, humor and statistics to the racist and sexist discrepancies in major art institutions. Wanting to keep the focus on the issues rather than their careers, the Guerrilla Girls adopted pseudonyms, appropriating the names of dead women artists. This allowed them to simultaneously remain anonymous, differentiate themselves from one another and draw attention to the oft-neglected artwork of women throughout history.
 
Some of their most well known work originated in the late-eighties. In 1989, the group conducted a “weenie count,” visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art and taking a statistical survey of the number of nude males in comparison to the number of nude females in the collection as well as the number of female artists collected as opposed to the number of male artists. They then published their statistics on bright yellow posters with an image of Ingres’ odalisque with a trademark Guerrilla Girl gorilla mask on her head and for a short time ran the sign through New York City on rented spaces on the sides of public buses. When the Guerrilla Girls conducted the same survey again in 2004 for the Venice Biennale exhibition of their work, curated by Rosa Martinez, they discovered that there were in fact fewer female artists in the Met than fifteen years before. In 2008, the Los Angeles businessman and art collector Eli Broad donated 50 million dollars to create the new Broad Contemporary Art Museum within the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The Guerrilla Girls were quick to investigate and tallied up the thirty artists in the inaugural exhibition as being 97% white and 87% male, and through a public letter campaign and demonstration made these statistics known. 

While counts and recounts such as these do seem to suggest that there is much work to be done in order to achieve true equality for women artists in the major art institutions, the Guerrilla Girls and their success is also a testimony to the changing attitudes in regards to identity politics in the art world. In the last three years alone, they have been included in major exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Tate Modern and the National Gallery of Art in D.C. to name but a few. They have garnered press coverage in the New York Times, The Guardian and The Washington Post as well as elsewhere. They have also published a number of books and pursued an active campaign in the educational sphere, regularly speaking publicly at universities and colleges and institutions—art and otherwise—worldwide. 
 
While two sub-groups of the Guerrilla Girls—the Guerrilla Girls on Tour and

GuerrillaGirlsBroadBand—broke off from the main group in 2001 in order to

 work specifically as a theater collective and internet/workplace activist group, respectively, Käthe Kollowitz, who is speaking this Saturday at the School of the Art Institute graduation, is one of the two remaining original members and a primary spokesperson for the undercover organization. She has been with the Guerrilla Girls from the start and will hopefully be imparting some of the knowledge gained from having traversed the art world so carefully. One has to wonder, though: What picture will she paint of the opportunities out there for male and female artists as well as white artists and artists of color alike? Will she recognize her group’s own success and recommend putting issues of identity politics at the forefront one’s work for both the community’s sake as well as one’s own? What specific tactics will she suggest? And will her message be one of hope or despair?