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Guerrilla Girl 'Frida Kahlo' at Middlebury College
19 April 2014
The member of Guerrilla Girls who named herself Frida Kahlo will perform at the Dance Theater at Middlebury College's Mahaney Center for the Arts.
The group's posters will be on display in the Middlebury College Museum of Art through May 25 2014 in a show titled “Guerrilla Girls: Art in Action.” The exhibit was produced by students taking part in a course on art, performance and activism taught by Emmie Donadio, the museum's chief curator.
Follow the link below to the Museum website
"Since their inception in 1984 the Guerrilla Girls have been working to expose sexual and racial discrimination in the art world, particularly in New York, and in the wider cultural arena. The group’s members protect their identities by wearing gorilla masks in public and by assuming pseudonyms taken from such deceased famous female figures as the writer Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) and the artist Frida Kahlo (1907-54). They formed in response to the International Survey of Painting and Sculpture held in 1984 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. The exhibition included the work of 169 artists, less than 10% of whom were women. Although female artists had played a central role in experimental American art of the 1970s, with the economic boom of the early 1980s in which artwork prices rose steeply, their presence in museum and gallery exhibitions diminished dramatically. Dubbing themselves the ‘conscience of the art world’, in 1985 the Guerrilla Girls began a poster campaign that targeted museums, dealers, curators, critics and artists who they felt were actively responsible for, or complicit in, the exclusion of women and non-white artists from mainstream exhibitions and publications." (from Tate website).
"Although the Guerrilla Girls themselves remain anonymous (though possibly not for long), their posters are instantly recognizable. "The posters were rude," wrote Susan Tallman in 1991. "They named names and they printed statistics (and almost always cited the source of those statistics at the bottom, making them difficult to dismiss). They embarrassed people. In other words, they worked."
In the vein of Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger, the Guerrilla Girls occupy the space between protest and poetry, seriousness and humor. Combining dismal facts with punchy sarcasm, the Guerrilla Girls both contribute to the constantly evolving public perception of feminism. "Humor helps when you're talking to someone who doesn't agree with you -- it's a way of communicating," the Guerrilla Girls said in an earlier interview with The Huffington Post. "When you make someone laugh they are on your side for a second."
Click here for posters images and for the complete article by The Huffington Post.
