CΔCHING OUT @ The Verge Center for the Arts


Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum?, 1989.          


The Birth of Feminism, 2001.
 All attention on The Verge Center for the Arts this past month for their most recent exhibition curated by Nysa Page-Lieberman, Not Ready to Make Nice: Guerrilla Girls in the Art World and Beyond. The opening on September 7th had the largest turn out we've seen in a gallery this year, and it's no wonder, for the Guerrilla Girls are sheroes not only in the arts, but their activism also stands for a multitude of social inequalities. The exhibit alone consists of their infamous posters that have ironically made art history books, and in conjunction with UNIQUE at California State University, Sacramento, an active and founding member of the Guerrilla Girls, Kathe Kolwitz lectured on campus on October 5th. The exhibit can be viewed until October 22nd, and we strongly urge each fellow to not miss this opportunity. 

The Guerrilla Girls are anonymous and they have rattled the art scene since they formed in 1985. They wear gorilla masks and unapologetically call out social injustice wherever they find it. Backed up by statistics, they make statements that examine how race, class, ethnicity, and gender effect human rights struggles. Underneath their hairy guise, they are artists and women (both cis and transgender) who take the names of deceased female artists. This lack of personal identification helps to keep the focus on the issues and the cause, instead of individual careers or personalities. As a group that has fought to fuse art and activism, their success has effected change and continues with their pursuit of, as Liv Moe, Director of The Verge described, "courageous campaigning and creative complaining."


Kathe Kolwitz speaking at Sacramento State.

As women of their time, what catalyzed their Feminist brigade is still relevant today. The most iconic image produced by the Guerrilla Girls was a graphic poster that responded to the lack of female artists shown in the major New York museums, and in particular the Metropolitan Museum of Art. If you have heard of the Guerrilla Girls, you have probably seen this poster, and if you visit the exhibit, you can view the vibrant yellow backdrop and the recumbent nude, penchant in a gorilla mask in person. The scale of the billboard size poster looms over the room, and its message is clearly read. "Do women have to be naked to get into U.S. museums?" The text continues, "Less than 2% of the artists in the Met. Museum are women, but 83% of the nudes are female." This was first displayed and based on their research in 1989, and Kolwitz (who is named after a Kathe Kollwitz, German Modernist painter, printmaker, and sculptor b.1865-d.1945) stated that the Guerrilla Girls recently checked in on these figures, and unfortunately the statistics have only improved by 4%, and that's the upper end. They have staged the same poster internationally for different museums in Europe, Asia and South America, and the dismal statistics are consistent. It begs the question, how have women come so far in so many regards and the glass ceiling still has yet to be shattered? This is why the Guerrilla Girls' works are still relevant, and all the more reason to promote their activist ventures and participate in the conversation, even if it's out of consternation and confrontation. 

Where are the women artists of Venice?, 2005.
 
As frontierswomen, their activism as art practice is also performative. They have bombed cities with stickers and posters in their masks and projected image and text onto the most endowed museum facades. Not only has the NY art world received the brunt of the criticism from the Guerrilla Girls, but Istanbul, Sao Paolo, London, Los Angeles and Shanghai have endured public shaming too. As seen in Not Ready to Make Nice, posters address the film and music industry as well, and in other languages too to best suit the viewer in its specific location. The poster which appropriates a scene from "La Dolce Vita", reads "Where are the women artists of Venice? Underneath the men." This vapid language was originally displayed in the Venice Biennale, and in typical Guerrilla Girls fashion, was directed at the history of the Biennale and the Italian film industry. They utilized their access to a global art event to formulate an internal critique, and Kolwitz proclaimed that this year, 2005, was what they dubbed the first Feminist Biennale because it had its first female curator, and was also conveniently the year which showed the most female artists.The posters are both informative and humorous, they are proof of the rise of and for intersectional feminism.


Horror on the National Mall!, 2007.
The walls of the Verge almost seem destined to show the scale of work like that of the Guerrilla Girls. The Verge consists of a mostly female staff and has consistently shown work by female artists, and artists whose work focuses on social issues. No other gallery, institution or center could support the caliber of content this exhibition carries. This show is not for profit, it's for knowledge and social equality awareness. So when a three-piece work titled Dearest art Collector in English (1986), Greek (2007) and Chinese (2008) consumes a wall, their progressive audience is already partial to their lamentations. But why is gender parity still a progressive issue? Perhaps Linda Nochlin's argument from her 1971 essay on "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?" still has the answer, or at least the direction to investigate. In Nochlin's words,"The question of women's equality - in art as in any other realm, devolves not upon the relative benevolence or ill-will of individual men, nor the self-confidence or abjectness of individual women, but rather on  the very nature of our institutional structures themselves and the view of reality they impose on the human beings who are a part of them." Obviously we have work to do here, and we are proud that The Verge Center for the Arts is part of the foundation for the arts of this region, and exposed the community to the work of the Guerrilla Girls. 


Detail of sticker wall.
Not Ready to Make Nice: Guerrilla Girls in the Art World and Beyond is on display from Sept. 7 - Oct. 22, and their film will be shown on Thursday, Oct. 19 at 7:30pm. 

For more information on The Verge, visit http://www.vergeart.com/ . 

For more information on the Guerrilla Girls, visit https://www.guerrillagirls.com/

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