After 40 Years as the Conscience of the Art World, the Guerrilla Girls Finally Get Their First L.A. Show
The survey, “Laugh, Cry, Fight,” got its name before the election, but it serves just as well in its aftermath, says a founding member.
A giant ape has overtaken Los Angeles exhibition venue Beyond the Streets—not King Kong, but Queen Kong. The official mascot of the Guerrilla Girls, in fact. This looming inflatable crowns “Laugh, Cry, Fight,” the first-ever L.A. exhibition for the famed anonymous art collective of rebellious women.
Each member of the Guerrilla Girls assumes the name of a historic female artist. They make public appearances only wearing their iconic gorilla masks. Regarding the exhibition’s title, founding member Käthe Kollwitz told me over Zoom, “We knew the show was going to start after the election, but we didn’t know how the election was going to turn out. It just seemed like a great motto for what we do.”
The Guerrilla Girls formed in 1985 in response to the show “An International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture” at New York’s Museum of Modern Art—which widely omitted women. They made posters highlighting the lack of female representation in art museum collections and posted them on the streets of New York art strongholds. This was a decade before Cost and Revs popularized wheat-pasted posters as street art—but six years after Jenny Holzer papered subway stations with her Inflammatory Essays. Reactions to the stunt were swift, widespread, and spirited.