This eye catching piece by the Guerrilla Girls from 1989 is straightforward and informative, which is why it caught my eye—plus the giant gorilla head. The Guerrilla girls are feminist artists who stay anonymous by wearing gorilla masks in public.
The piece was created when the Public Art Fund commissioned them to design a billboard. The Girls visited the met and saw the alarming ratio of female artists to female nude art. The Public Art Fund rejected the piece as a billboard and it was instead displayed on NYC buses. The woman in the photo is from the female nude painting La grande odalisque (1814) by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres.
This issue is definitely still relevant today because while society has come a long way sexism is never going to disappear, at least not for a long time. Part of the problem is that so many famous classical European artists loved to paint naked women and those pieces are wanted by museums. The more we take a chapter out of Kimberly Drew’s book This is What I Know About Art and push ourselves to keep evolving art the more protest art such as this will become less relevant and that is the ultimate goal.
Funnily enough I found this piece of protest art on the Met’s website so in that regard the Met has recognized its core issues following 1989.
Leave a Reply