At the Getty Research Institute, the Guerrilla Girls Mark 40 Years of Calling Out the Art World
The Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles is presenting its largest retrospective to date on the Guerrilla Girls, the anonymous collective known for addressing sexism and bias in the art world. The exhibition, “How to Be a Guerrilla Girl,” on view from November 18, 2025 to April 26, 2026, offers an overview of the group’s four decades of activity. As reported by Jordan Riefe in the Observer on December 2nd, 2025, the show draws extensively from the collective’s archives.
Posters, handwritten tallies, planning documents, and research files demonstrate how the Guerrilla Girls combined humor, advertising strategies, and detailed data collection to highlight persistent inequalities. Co-curator Kristin Juarez notes their evidence-based approach: statistics and spreadsheets became tools for publicly holding institutions accountable.
Formed in 1984 after a MoMA exhibition included only a small number of women artists, the collective adopted gorilla masks and aliases to protect their identities. Their posters, open letters, and satirical works—such as “Advantages of Being a Woman Artist”—played a central role in raising awareness and challenging established power structures in the art world.

