Guerrilla Girls
Founded New York City, 1985
Do Women Have to Be Naked to Get into the MET Museum? (from Portfolio Compleat: 1985–2012)
1989
Offset lithograph on paper
11 × 27 15/16 in. (27.9 × 70.9 cm)
Joseph H. Hirshhorn Purchase Fund, 2014 (14.9.24). Copyright © Guerrilla Girls and courtesy of guerrillagirls.com. Photo: Cathy Carver
Since 1985, the Guerrilla Girls, an anonymous group of activist feminist artists, have donned gorilla masks to hide their identities while staging public interventions and acts of resistance. They are best known for their poster campaigns, which use bold graphics, researched data, and humor to expose corruption, gender and ethnic inequality, and class biases in art, pop culture, and politics. Do Women Have to Be Naked to Get into the MET Museum? appropriates the iconic female nude from Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres’s Grande Odalisque (1814), updating the painting with a gorilla mask and adding data-driven statistics about inequity in gender representation at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. In the past three and a half decades, the Guerrilla Girls have continued to generate critique-based projects and acts of resistance, often appropriating images from art history and the media to call out museums, galleries, and popular culture.
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