Guerrilla Girls: The Art of Behaving Badly by Guerrilla Girls

 

The Guerrilla Girls are a group of anonymous activists who wear gorilla masks when they appear in public, and campaign against social inequality, inequality w/r/t the wage gap, and inequality in the art industry (especially when it comes to representation by women and people of color). I'd heard about them before in some of my other readings but I didn't know of any of their specific work, so it was cool to read a collection of their "Greatest Hits" and see how they put up flyers and did demonstrations to further equality and diversity.

It's worth noting that in the ebook, only about half of the "book" is actual content. The other half is a bibliography and index. This didn't factor into my rating but I know other people might be bothered by that. I liked the book but after a while, some of the campaigns started to feel redundant, especially with the most famous one (the one about how women have to be posing for a nude to appear in an art museum) being shown multiple times. I get it, it was a bomb campaign, but it started to lose its punch after the tenth time or whatever.

I think this is a better resource than it is a book of pleasure reading. If you're writing a paper on art or the history of feminism, I would highly recommend getting your hands on a copy of this because they're cool. And it's important to illustrate (literally and figuratively) that the work of feminism is still NOT done, that women and people of color are still grossly underrepresented across multiple fields, including art, and that there are powerful people in politics who still campaign daily to not only prevent their rights from advancing but also to strip away the extant ones.

3 out of 5 stars