Guerrilla Girls Rhetorical Analysis

The Guerrilla Girls, a collective of anonymous female artists, who challenge the public to think through their art work. Hiding behind the names of famous female artist and gorilla mask these women seek justice and equality for female artist. By producing posters, books, and performances, the Guerrilla Girls reach for the goal of exposing acts of sexism and racism in politics, the art world, film, and culture at large. The group’s method of exaggerating the rhetorical strategies used to propagate the normalcy of male domination in the art world translate well to their critiques of popular and political culture, and that this method is an important aspect of feminist discourse today. The deep history of the Guerrilla Girls and the ideas behind

Museum?” and underneath, “Less than 5% of the artists in the Modern Art sections are women, but 85% of the nudes are female.” What kind of feelings would this invoke to both male and female viewers? The poster Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum? (Figure 1) was the Guerrilla Girls’ response in 1989 from the Public Art Fund in New York to design a billboard that would attract the general audience. The text being more than eye grabbing enough for the public it is followed by a reclining nude woman wearing a gorilla mask with surprisingly and in a way humorist large teeth. The woman in the billboard is an appropriation of Grand Odalisque (Figure 2) painted by Augusta Dominique Ingres in 1814. The gorilla mask that the woman is wearing is very similar to that which is worn by the Guerrilla Girls whenever the choice to make an appearance in public to help hide their identities. The advertisement for the exclusion in exhibiting practices sadly appeared on busses instead of billboards that it was originally planned to be on. The Public Art Fund rejected the design stating that the message behind it wasn’t clear enough. The Guerrilla Girls rented ad space on New York busses to have the poster make its way around the city. The company canceled the running of the ad due to the image of the Odalisque and that it was too suggestive for the public because of the fan in the figures hand that many suggested that it looked like an erect