To mark the 40th anniversary of the iconic feminist art collective Guerrilla Girls, the Getty Center is opening an exclusive exhibition featuring rare archive material, among other things. How to Be a Guerrilla Girl will be on display in Los Angeles from November 18.
No one knows who they are or how many artists are part of the collective: with their iconic gorilla masks and satirical, truth-revealing posters, the Guerrilla Girls are one of the most famous collectives in the world. They were founded in response to an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1984, in which only 13 of the 169 artists exhibited were female. Advantages of Being a Woman Artist (1988) and Do Women Have To Be Naked To Get Into The Met Museum? (1989) are among the group's most famous works. Based on a comprehensive archive that has been in the possession of the Getty Museum since 2008, the current exhibition marking the 40th anniversary of the Guerrilla Girls offers a chronological overview of the collective's development and features rarely seen archival material. How to Be a Guerrilla Girl opens on November 18, 2025, and runs through April 12, 2026.
The Guerrilla Girls have created a newly-commissioned work for the exhibition that explores the Getty's own collection of European painting and sculpture. Using comic strip style speech bubbles, they reimagine the voices of women represented in these artworks through a twenty-first century lens. The commission exposes deeply rooted biases in the representation of women in Guerilla Girls characteristic witty style.
Other retrospectives of the Guerrilla Girls this year included Guerrilla Girls: Making Trouble at the National Museum for Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C., and Guerrilla Girls: The Art of Behaving Badly at the National Gallery of Bulgaria in Sofia.
From November 13 to 30, the Fremantle Biennale took place in Australia near Perth, focusing on site-specific contemporary art. Among the exhibiting artists was Raki Nikahetiya with a sensory installation about the intertwining of identity, displacement, and home.
ART AROUND 1800 was the title of a well-known exhibition cycle held at the Hamburger Kunsthalle from 1974 to 1981. Now the museum is opening an annotated and updated edition: starting on December 5, ART AROUND 1800 will show over 50 paintings, books, and graphic works from the museum's collection.
