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Criticism

Race

While often advocating for art institutions to display more artists of color, the Guerrilla Girls are not immune to perpetuating white supremacy in their own collective. The Guerrilla Girls potentially do not meet the demands for racial diversity they make of art institutions in their own organization, for, as former Guerrilla Girl “Zora Neale Hurston” explains, the membership of the Guerrilla Girls “was mostly white” and largely mirrored the demographics of the art world they critiqued. The founders of the group are all white, and the de facto leadership of the Guerrilla Girls in recent years, "Frida Kahlo" and "Kathe Kollwitz," are both white. (“Frida Kahlo” has also been criticized for her appropriation of a Latina artist’s name.) However, any precise information on the demographics of the Guerrilla Girls is impossible, for they have “staunchly, and problematically, resisted being surveyed as to the makeup of their own membership."

Those people of color who have been a part of the Guerrilla Girls have faced numerous challenges by being part of the organization. Tokenism, silencing, disrespect, and whitewashing have driven many artists of color away from the Guerrilla Girls. “Alma Thomas” describes being uncomfortable, as a black woman, with wearing the Guerrilla Girls’ signature gorilla masks. Little effort was devoted to understanding the challenges of artists of color; “their whiteness was such that they…. didn't understand that blacks were being put in a completely separate world in the art world, that black male artists and black female artists are completely separated, completely segregated to this day." Ultimately, this widespread antagonism has lead to many “artists of color who… left after a few meetings because they could sense the unspoken hierarchy in the group."

Second-Wave Feminism and Essentialism

Anonymous MCAD student protest against the Guerrilla Girls

Having been created in the 80’s, it is not surprising that the Guerrilla Girls largely adopted the feminist ideologies of their time. The Guerrilla Girls emerged at the tail end of the second-wave feminist movement, and thus had to navigate the differences between established and emerging feminist theory. “Alma Thomas” describes this grey-area the Guerrilla Girls occupied as “universalist feminism,” bordering on essentialism. Anna Chave claims the Guerrilla Girls’ essentialism was much more profound, leading the group to be “assailed by… a rising generation of women wise in the ways of poststructuralist theory, for [their] putative naiveté and susceptibility to essentialism." This essentialism may be most clearly exhibited in two pieces by the Guerrilla Girls: their 1998 book The Guerrilla Girls Bedside Companion to the History of Western Art and their piece The Estrogen Bomb (2003-13). In regards to the former, “Alma Thomas” explains that “[The Guerrilla Girls Bedside Companion to the History of Western Art] was so embedded in that second-wave feminist and even pre-second-wave essentialism.” Critiques of The Estrogen Bomb for being transmisogynistic have recently been voiced anonymously by students at Minneapolis College of Art and Design. Aside from essentialism, the Guerrilla Girls have also been critiqued for failing to integrate intersectionality into their work. However, it is worth noting that the beliefs of the Guerrilla Girls are not monolithic, and individual members have many different understandings of feminism.

Internal Disputes

Leading up to their 2003 lawsuit, “Frida Kahlo” and “Kathe Kollwitz” faced growing animosity from other members of the Guerrilla Girls. Despite intentions for a non-hierarchal, equitable power structure, in the late ‘90s it developed that in the day-to-day work of the Guerrilla Girls, “there were two people who were going to make the final decisions no matter what you said." The authoritarian rule of “Kahlo” and “Kollwitz’” was most evident in the publishing of the Guerrilla Girls’ second book, The Guerrilla Girls Bedside Companion to the History of Western Art. “Kahlo” and “Kollwitz” controlled completely the direction of the book, and, despite using material created collectively by the Guerrilla Girls, claimed credit for the book and took all of the profits made off it. Other members condemned the book as “undemocratic and… against the spirit of the [Guerrilla] Girls."

Eventually, this uneven power structure lead five Guerrilla Girls to be “fired” from the collective. (These members went on to form Guerrilla Girls BroadBand.) At the same time, “Kahlo” and “Kollwitz” were in the process of trademarking the name “Guerrilla Girls,” leading to them filing a lawsuit in 2003 against both Guerrilla Girls BroadBand and Guerrilla Girls On Tour! for infringing upon their trademark. This move prompted ire from many current and former Guerrilla Girls, who objected to the attempts of “Kahlo” and “Kollwitz” to claim responsibility for the creation of a collective effort, as well as the flippancy with which the two members discarded their anonymity in the course of the lawsuit.

Selling-out

Upon their debut in 1985, the Guerrilla Girls began to be praised by the same art world they critiqued. Since then, this dynamic has only intensified, with the Guerrilla Girls staging cooperative exhibitions with museums and allowing their work to be kept by hegemonic institutions. This has lead some to question the efficacy, if not the hypocrisy, of the group working within the same structures they critique.