The Guerrilla Girls are stirring up Hamburg: in 150 years everything will be better

What do Eva Hesse, Frida Kahlo and Georgia O’Keeffe have in common apart from being among the most important artists of the 20th century? The New York activist group Guerrilla Girls also uses these three as pseudonyms, along with a number of other names of deceased artists, in order to guarantee the anonymity of its members.

And so, on the occasion of the exhibition “The F*word – Guerrilla Girls and Feminist Graphic Design” in the Hamburg Museum for Arts and Crafts, Frida Kahlo v, freshly flown in from New York, appeared at the opening to give an insight into the history of the collective. She had covered her face with a shaggy gorilla mask, because guerrilla girls never show their true colors.

Founded in 1985, when the Museum of Modern Art showed only 13 women in an overview show with the supposedly 165 most important artists in the world, the group, which initially consisted of only seven members, began to tackle sexism and exclusion in a way that was both provocative and humorous of women in the art business. Soon after, the marginalization of other groups also came into focus.

Frida Kahlo recalls: “We looked at critics, curators, artists, galleries and everything around it and found that the white male paradigm was dominant everywhere in the art world. So we decided to make this public. Back then, everyone just thought that art belonged to men.”

Social networks didn’t exist in 1985, so the group chose a medium that was present on every corner: the poster. “The streets were an open space, plus it was cheap. Check out the first posters we made. They haven’t even been printed yet. We used sticky letters. Everything was free. We got people’s attention very quickly. And we didn’t have to get any permits. There were no filters on the street.”

With the HIV crisis, the Black Lives Matter movement and LGBTQIA+ awareness, the group’s perspective has constantly expanded to this day: “The reactions at the time quickly showed us that it was not just about women, but also artists of color , basically anyone who wasn’t a straight white male. So we turned to these many different aspects of the art world,” says Frida Kahlo.

In the central room of the Hamburg exhibition, which is well worth seeing, numerous posters of the Guerrilla Girls from different decades can be seen. Her statistical surveys make it clear that the male share dominates in the exhibition business, galleries mainly work with men and critics: inside discuss exhibitions by men more often than by women.

The Guerrilla Girls have also found a coherent image for the Museum of Arts and Crafts. A huge banner with a Franzbrötchen on it, a pastry typical of Hamburg, is emblazoned on the facade. A broken crumb represents the 1.5 percent women currently represented in the Museum’s Prints and Posters Collection. The head of department, Julia Mee, was shocked herself when this statistical survey was completed. She regrets that the museum has collected so little from women and wants to change this in the future: “There have always been women designers who have done incredibly good work.”

Meer’s first exhibition at the house brings together around 500 works by designers from the period from 1870 to the present day from its own inventory: including posters for theatre, film, politics and protest, book and magazine covers, collages, advertisements and much more. The exhibition graphics and an additional show on female typeface designers come from the Berlinier design office Rimini, an interdisciplinary network that specializes in the cultural sector.

From an open call, the museum received around 200 submissions from feminist zines, i.e. small magazines that are produced by women. The themes are diverse: menstruation and political protest, the housewife dilemma and lesbian love. All -zines stay in the museum and become part of the graphic collection, because now the development of a new focus with queer feminist graphic design is planned. Julia Meer has calculated when the ratio of men and women in her department could be balanced: “If we continue to collect at the same pace, it will take 150 years.” At least the exhibition is a start.

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