Issue date: 11/9/07 Section: Arts & Culture

Media Credit: Emmy Liss Guerrilla Girl Kathe Kolkwitz wears a mask to maintain anonymity to describe the problems of discrimination in the art world.

A founding member of the Guerrilla Girls, an influential art activist group, spoke Tuesday night to a packed Carmichael Auditorium. The speaker - who goes by the name Kathe Kollwitz and wears a gorilla mask when working with the group - presented a slide show of the group's past work, and with humor and facts, outlined problems of discrimination in Hollywood, politics and the art world, from the founding of the Guerrilla Girls in 1985 to today. Tuesday's event was sponsored by the Feminist Majority Leadership Alliance.

The Guerrilla Girls, as the credo on their Web site states, are "fighting discrimination with facts, humor and fake fur." Members of the group maintain anonymity by wearing gorilla masks and using the names of dead female artists when representing the group publicly.

When a group member misspelled "guerrilla" as "gorilla" on a poster, the group found its image. Members of the Guerrilla Girls have worn gorilla masks ever since, both to protect their careers and personal lives. The masks also serve to remove their personalities from the work of the group, so that when viewers look at them, they see an icon that stands for fighting for fairness and not a person, Kollwitz told The Herald.

"Now, anonymity is kind of a schtick," Kollwitz said. "But in the beginning it was totally self-serving. We were afraid our work with the group would hurt our careers. Also, the anonymity kept the focus on the issues, and it made us a symbol for women. We needed a disguise, so we came up with this conflation of gorilla and guerrilla."

The group's earliest work targeted the art world and the sexist culture that it felt allowed male artists to dominate shows in museums and top galleries. The Guerrilla Girls were founded chiefly in reaction to an exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. The 1985 exhibit, "An International Survey of Painting and Sculpture," was designed to showcase the most significant works of contemporary art in the world. Out of 169 artists, only 13 were women.

Since then, the Guerrilla Girls have branched out to new domains - they have recently focused their attention on Hollywood. Recently, the Guerrilla Girls staged a billboard campaign to protest race and sex discrimination in the film industry. The billboards combined humor and compelling visuals - a gorilla in a pink dress clutching an Academy Award - with disturbing facts. For example, one billboard, which Kollwitz showed a slide of at the event, noted that women directed a mere seven percent of the top 200 films of 2005.

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