Like American artists Barbara Kruger (born 1945) and Jenny Holzer (born 1950), the Guerrilla Girls appropriated the visual language of advertising, specifically fly-posting, to convey their messages in a quick and accessible manner. They pasted up their first posters on SoHo streets in the middle of the night. Combining bold block text with lists and statistics that were compiled by the Girls themselves or reinterpreted from existing sources such as art magazines and museum reports, the posters named New York galleries that showed no more than 10% women artists (Tate P78810) and listed successful male artists who allowed their work to be shown in galleries showing little or no work by women (Tate P78809). Other posters, such as ‘We Sell White Bread’ (1987, Tate P78800), first appeared as peel-off stickers on gallery windows and doors. With such posters as ‘The Advantages of Being a Woman Artist’ (1988, Tate P78796) and ‘Relax Senator Helms, the Art World is your kind of place (1989, Tate P78792) the Girls used wit and irony to point a critical finger at double standards prevalent in the art world and elsewhere.
Liz McQuiston, Suffragettes and She-Devils, London 1997, pp.11, 114-15, 122-3, 140-1, 150-2 and 158, reproduced p.114 in colour.
Whitney Chadwick, Guerrilla Girls, Confessions of the Guerrilla Girls, New York 1995, reproduced pp.60-1 in colour.