The Brooklyn Rail

This interview with two of the founding members of the Guerrilla Girls, “Frida Kahlo” and “Käthe Kollwitz,” took place July 3, 2025, with follow-up questions in September. It was occasioned by the collective’s fortieth anniversary, which is being commemorated by a show at the Getty Center, in the Getty Research Institute Gallery (November 18, 2025–April 12, 2026), How to Be a Guerrilla Girl, curated by Zanna Gilbert, Kristin Juarez, Thisbe Gensler, Alex Jones, Daniela Ruano Orantes, and Megan Sallabedra.

Discussed here are key moments in the collective’s history, their actions to “fire the canon,” as they put it in The Guerrilla Girls’ Bedside Companion to the History of Western Art (Penguin Books, 1998) as well as recent exhibitions and their newest book. LAUGH, CRY, FIGHT! . . . with the Guerrilla Girls was on view at Beyond the Streets Gallery, Los Angeles, November 22, 2024–January 19, 2025; Discrimi-NATION: Guerrilla Girls on Bias, Money, and Art at Hannah Traore Gallery, New York, January 16-March 29, 2025; and THE ART OF BEHAVING BADLY at the National Gallery, Sofia, Bulgaria, March 5–June 10, 2025. Opening this month at the Getty is HOW TO BE A GUERRILLA GIRL. The Getty acquired the Guerrilla Girls’ archive in 2008 and is also publishing their forthcoming (January 2028) “graphic memoir,” Guerrilla Girls Forever: Our Lives of Art and Activism, in collaboration with comics artist and painter Sabrina Jones.

Joan Simon (Rail): The Guerrilla Girls’ first press release, dated May 6, 1985, announced: “Posters pointing to the inadequate numbers of women artists represented in leading New York galleries are appearing in SoHo streets, on walls, streetlamps, and telephone booths.” Its sign-off was: “Simple facts will be spelled out. Obvious conclusions can be drawn.” How and to whom did you distribute the press release?

“Frida Kahlo”: Everything at that point was done by snail mail. I don’t think there were even fax machines. We had envelope-stuffing parties to send things out.

“Käthe Kollwitz”: In the beginning that was certainly true. We didn’t do a great job of publicizing, but we were lucky. The fact that the posters were plastered up on SoHo streets drew a lot of people.

Rail: About how many of you went out that first night of wheat-pasting the posters?

“Kollwitz”: Six or seven. My memory is that we all met. We had our buckets. We had our stuff. We did it.

“Kahlo”: I recall that we had to break into teams because one girl had to sort of hold the poster up and the other had to spread the glue. I’m even wondering if we wore masks the first night because I do remember it was a mess, a total mess, to put the posters up in masks.

“Kollwitz”: We didn’t have masks yet, Frida, at first when we postered. No masks until later.

Rail: Was it the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) show of 1984—An International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture—or something else or several prompts that triggered the first coming together of artists that became the Guerrilla Girls?

“Kollwitz”: So that’s a really interesting question, because obviously it wasn’t just the MoMA thing. That was the culmination of the incredible discrimination we saw around us individually, even before we were the Guerrilla Girls. Frida and I went to this protest outside the Museum of Modern Art; we were walking around this picket line, and we realized nobody going into the museum cared at all.

We realized they thought that what was in the museum was the best stuff. There was no question about discrimination in a museum. The museums knew what they were doing. And if it was worth something it would be in the museum, which, you know, was laughable then, and it is totally laughable now, of course. But that was really the aha moment. I remember it so clearly. There had to be a better way to convince people that this was a real issue.

“Kahlo”: It also made us realize that people thought the art world was a meritocracy. And every way we looked at it, it didn’t pan out. There was nothing to explain why almost all of the opportunities went to white men. Because there were plenty of trained and prolific women and artists of color and it was the white guys who were getting all the attention. We were trying to explain that to the world, to the people who went to art museums.

We decided to do it subgroup by subgroup. First, we went after our fellow artists Then we went after the galleries that showed them. And then we went after critics who never wrote about women artists and museums that didn’t show women artists. It was one subgroup of the artworld after another, and each one kind of passed the buck.

Male artists didn’t think they could influence what their galleries showed. Galleries didn’t show women artists because they didn’t sell, and critics couldn’t write about women artists because they never saw them. How could museums acquire works by women or artists of color? They weren’t out there to see. We just decided to go after one subculture in the art world after another and just see what they would say.

“Kollwitz”: And do it in a really new kind of in-your-face way. So, we named names. The Guerrilla Girls from the very beginning always wanted to find different ways to bring up an issue—a way that could really change people’s minds, that was un-refutable in some way.

Rail: There was a comment by the MoMA exhibition curator Kynaston McShine that was reported as particularly offensive. He was quoted as saying that anyone who wasn’t in his show should re-think “his career.”

“Kollwitz”: That was the flashpoint.

“Kahlo”: That was super annoying. He assumed that his expertise was not to be questioned. Sadly, that quote was in his obituary. He said that anyone who wasn’t in his show should re-think their career. I think we were even mentioned in his obituary. I’d have to check that. It’s questionable whether he actually said “his” or he didn’t. I think that’s something that we need to go back and examine. I believe a critic wrote about that somewhere.

Rail: Yes, it would be good to go back and check; it would be good to correct the record here if that’s so. When I was doing some fact-checking I found mention of the Guerrilla Girls in artnet.com’s McShine obit and that Roberta Smith mentioned the Guerrilla Girls in her obituary of McShine in the New York Times. I also saw that McShine’s quote in the artnet.com obit said, “rethink his career.” I’d be curious to know, Frida, what the critic you mentioned said.

“Kahlo”: I promise I will look. I’ll research that because I do recall it was a critic in Texas, and he wrote to us about it. In any case, whatever pronoun the curator used, whether it was their or his, McShine was basically saying that he was the arbiter, the absolute and final arbiter. That whatever was in that show was the be-all and end-all, that if it was primarily white guys, well that meant that they were doing the most significant work in the entire world.

Rail: Could you describe the first gathering that became the Guerrilla Girls?

“Kollwitz”: It was at Frida Kahlo’s loft, and we didn’t know what to expect. We asked a few people who we knew were sympathetic to what we were saying and might have something to add. It’s hard to remember exactly how many were there. I know some of the early members have claimed to know the exact number, but I can't remember.

But it was small. It was small. The other important thing about the meeting is we didn't just get together to hang out and talk about stuff. Frida and I brought the first poster, a drawing of the first poster to that meeting, and the meeting was focused not on dealing with all the issues, which we certainly did later, but it was focused on that poster. Another person suggested, let’s do one for the galleries too. And that became our first two posters on that press release that you were quoting before. Joan.

Rail: You’re saying that the images of the first two posters were included in the first press release.

“Kollwitz”: Yes, it has two pictures.

Rail: Was the group exclusively artists or primarily constituted of artists?

“Kahlo”: I recall the first meeting was all artists with the exception of one who was also a curator. And every time we met, because we were kind of an amorphous group, someone would bring someone along. We didn’t have any rules. We didn’t have any initiation procedures, although later we pretended we did. And they were silly, but we accepted anyone who had come to a meeting. It was very idealistic and non-hierarchical at that point. And every meeting had a different tenor and a different mix.

Rail: What was that first poster?

“Kahlo”: WHAT DO THESE ARTISTS HAVE IN COMMON? THEY ALLOW THEIR WORK TO BE SHOWN IN GALLERIES THAT SHOW NO MORE THAN 10% WOMEN ARTISTS OR NONE AT ALL. We did the research, Joan, in a kind of interesting way because there was no internet then, and if you called up a gallery, they would never really tell you all the artists they had. We went to the Art in America annual. Do you remember that?

Rail: Yes. I was working at Art in America at the time it was started [1982]. By the time the Guerrilla Girls formed in 1985, I had left the magazine and was working for a museum start-up in SoHo, where I saw your first posters.

“Kahlo”: It was so easy to do. We chose a number of male artists who would not get along with each other, who were diametrically opposed in their outlook, in their ideology, in their work, and we decided to put them all on a list. Then we researched them, and almost all of them were in galleries that didn’t show any women at all.

So that’s why we said, “What do these artists have in common?” And if you looked at them, they didn’t really have anything in common—except that they didn’t care if their galleries showed women or artists of color. The second poster of the galleries was just a reverse of that: THESE GALLERIES SHOW NO MORE THAN 10% WOMEN ARTISTS OR NONE AT ALL. We looked up the galleries that those guys showed in and made up a list of those galleries. So one was like the flip of the other. We used to call it five-minute research because it was so easy to do research from the Art in America annual.

Our program was really small, and now it wouldn’t be so easy to determine the gender or the sexual orientation of artists just from looking at their names. But at that point it was, although I remember we had to call a couple of galleries to determine the gender of some artists that had names that were not obviously genderized.

Rail: Apparently those two posters came to the attention of the folks at The Palladium, which prompted the Guerrilla Girls’ first invitation to curate an exhibition at that club in 1985. How did that come about and what did you finally do?

“Kollwitz”: We don’t exactly know if they were reacting to those two posters but The Palladium sent a message to us inviting us to do a show of women artists and we did. Because we couldn’t include EVERY woman artist, we regretted being curators, and never did a show of women artists again. Later, The Clocktower asked us something similar, but instead we did a critique of the Whitney Biennials.

Rail: Which came first: choosing noms de guerre, the names of dead women artists—or the name of the collective, Guerrilla Girls?

“Kollwitz”: The group name came first, and it was a while later that we adopted pseudonyms. We wanted to make it clear that we weren’t the usual protest group. That we were something else. We decided to use words that annoyed everybody. “Girls”—because at that time a grown woman was not supposed to call herself a girl. That was before “girl power” became a big thing in the culture. And “guerrilla” annoyed everybody because obviously we are not actual freedom-fighters.

“Kahlo”: The art world was so genteel at that point. The idea that there might be guerrilla fighters hidden at openings or hidden at fancy parties or maybe working deep in the bowels of a museum—in a way it was to scare people in power to think that they were constantly being surveilled and watched.

Rail: Because they were.

“Kollwitz”: [laughs]

“Kahlo”: Well, we wanted them to fear being surveilled. Their fear was greater than our capability to do it.

Rail: Context is important here. Though wheat-pasting posters was a familiar, daring, engaging, and accessible format of Jenny Holzer’s Truisms and other works and the bold typography with in-your-face images that were politically, stunningly on-point in Barbara Kruger’s project , it should be emphasized how radical and outrageous it was then for the Guerrilla Girls to name names, a direct, visceral, public “J’accuse.”

There were other flash points, too, as I remember. In 1981, there was “A New Spirit in Painting" at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, curated by Norman Rosenthal, Nicholas Serota, and Christos M. Joachimides. Susan Heller Anderson reported in the New York Times that thirty-six of the thirty-eight artists in the show were living and that there wasn’t a single work by a woman. At the “Zeitgeist” exhibition of 1982, curated by Christos M. Joachimides and Norman Rosenthal, at Berlin’s Martin Gropius Bau, only one artist was a woman, Susan Rothenberg, who, as John Russell wrote in his New York Times review, was “the first and only woman ever to have been included in an exhibition organized by Mr. Joachimedes and Mr. Rosenthal.” Rothenberg had recommended studio visits with other women artists to the show’s organizers.

While there were protests about the lack of women in Zeitgeist, the MoMA reopening, after being closed for renovations and expansion including the construction of an apartment tower, received major press attention and close scrutiny of McShine’s inaugural MoMA survey.

“Kollwitz”: A couple of future members of the Guerrilla Girls were in that MoMA march with us. The aha moment was us walking around there.

“Kahlo”: It took us a couple of months to work it out and we used to meet at Fanelli’s and just laugh and joke and make fun of the art world and finally we realized that if we did some kind of subversive posters, we could claim them on the streets of SoHo. We would go out on a Friday night, so that there wasn’t enough time for them to be plastered over because it was very competitive.

SoHo was undergoing a lot of renovations and there were just lots of plywood walls that we could put the posters up on. Right next to the galleries. And we didn’t just do that. We'd also slap posters right on the door of a gallery.

“Kollwitz”: Yeah. It’s amazing that we had any effect at all because on those New York streets, two hours later, someone would be sticking something else up.

Rail: I read in a 2007 interview that the artist who became known as “Rosalba Carriera” was the Guerrilla Girl who hit upon the idea of taking the names of dead women artists to restore them to art history.

“Kollwitz”: I don’t have a memory of that, but--

“Kahlo”: Maybe. It kind of happened because we were invited to be on a very prominent NPR interview program out of Philadelphia early on and some of the members who were going down for the interview realized that they had been asked to differentiate themselves on the radio interview so that people would know who was saying what. And we hadn’t figured that all out.

It wasn’t long after Georgia O’Keeffe had died and someone said [laughs], “Well you know, why don’t I call myself Georgia O’Keeffe. Everyone’s thinking about her now.” And then everyone just picked a name. The interesting thing is that the interview never got broadcast. It was done with a radio host I’m sure you know.

“Kollwitz”: You should say the name. There’s nothing wrong with that.

“Kahlo”: Well, you know who it was. It was Terry Gross.

“Kollwitz”: Well, that’s—

“Kahlo”: —history.

Rail: Well, I’m going to search for it.

“Kahlo”: I don’t think it ever even showed up in her archive. We would certainly give her the opportunity to interview us now.

Rail: Which Guerrilla Girls went to Philadelphia to do that interview?

FK/KK: We’re not sure but it was neither of us.

Rail: How did each of you choose your Guerrilla name and why?

“Kollwitz”: Go ahead, Frida.

“Kahlo”: Hayden Herrera wrote the first English biography of Frida Kahlo. It came out a couple of years before the Guerrilla Girls and I read it. I know none of you believe this, but I feel myself to be a very socially shy person under my real name and I was taken by how outspoken Frida Kahlo was. She called a pokeria a pokeria. I just always identified with her. I wish that I could be that outspoken, and I thought maybe if I wore a gorilla mask I could be. Her politics and her life were very tempestuous and just filled with drama. I just was so drawn to her as a personality.

Rail: And “Käthe”?

“Kollwitz”: I chose Käthe Kollwitz because she was a political artist who took on all kinds of issues—war, anti-war stuff, stuff about women, children, all kinds of things, in what turned out to be a very dangerous time and in fact she survived it. It’s amazing, but with everything she did, she survived it. That’s why I chose her.

Rail: What’s it been like wearing gorilla masks for all these years? Do the Guerrilla Girls choose their own masks? And where do you get them?

“Kollwitz”: [laughs] Well, originally there were tons of gorilla masks. There were those stores all over the country that sold Halloween costumes—gorillas and other kinds of apes, Planet of the Apes, all that crazy kind of stuff. In the beginning we all had different masks that were very rare. Now we all have the same masks because there’s only one, really, that you can count on. It has a moving mouth which is really good if you’re talking to people. You can stand there like a statue, but with the mouth going up and down and up and down.

Rail: I’m also reminded of masks you’ve produced that others may wear in solidarity with you: the paper-bag masks, the flat cut-out gorilla masks and, the one I especially like the cotton shopping tote imprinted with gorilla mask and with eye-holes cut-out so that, inverted, it can be worn over one’s head.

“Kahlo”: My mask is my security blanket. It’s fun to put it on. You’d be surprised at what you’re able to say when your physical appearance is hidden and no one can make a judgment about you according to your hair color, how young you are, or what you look like. So, to me it’s like a wonderful megaphone. It’s not comfortable but sometimes I just love to retreat in it. You can also grimace and make all kinds of facial gestures of disbelief or whatever and no one knows that you’re doing it. So we do have kind of the same masks, all of us now. It’s crazy.

We had a gig at the University of Maryland and when I got to the airport to fly out, I realized I didn’t have my mask with me, and it was like, Oh my god, what am I going to do? So we called the students ahead and said “when you bring us from the airport, would you please take us somewhere where we can buy a gorilla mask.” And it was hilarious. They took us to the Halloween store in Baltimore where John Waters gets all his outfits.

And they had this gigantic gorilla head waiting for me. It was so heavy and the truth of it is that most gorilla masks are kind of sexist in nature because they’re almost all males.

[Laughter]

“Kahlo”: The males have these humps on their heads. The female gorillas don’t. So, most of the masks are masks of male gorillas. And you know gorillas are very gentle animals. They’re big and they’re scary because they’re larger than humans, and they have anatomy so close to ours that people are afraid, but they live very peacefully. They live in harems. And the females look after each other and after each other’s young. The alpha males oftentimes wander off. Sometimes they’ll be threatened by a second male, and the female will chase them off.

Rail: Is it true that at least one of the Guerrilla Girls participated in a group exhibition under her dead artist pseudonym and also under her actual name?

“Kollwitz”: Been in the same show at the same time? Like two identities, but separate?

Rail: Yes. Two kinds of participation by one artist.

“Kollwitz”: Yes, that is true. I think that may have happened to quite a few of our members, and it certainly happened to me. My mistake was I decided to go to the opening as both. It was like ducking into the bathroom to change—change my clothes completely, put the mask on—and then I would go do that, and then I would take it all off, and then I would go do that. And it was really bizarre. It didn’t work that well. I would not do that again.

“Kahlo”: Did anyone recognize your shoes?

“Kollwitz”: No, I don’t think it was anything like that. It was one or the other; I never tried to be both. It was several years ago in D.C. So that’s the only time I actually ever decided to experiment with that, and that will not happen again.

Rail: There are three, separate independent wings, divided from the founding collective, which is now known as Guerrilla Girls; Guerrilla Girls on Tour; and GuerrillaGirlsBroadband (aka “The Broads”).

“Kahlo”: Collaboration is a very delicate thing. You might be able to collaborate with one person but not with another. You kind of have to jibe. It’s like dancing. And we didn’t have any membership rules, so every meeting was a different mixture of people. And sometimes it would get contentious. Some people could work with others and others could work with some but not with others. I remember some people who would just come to one meeting and say, “I can’t deal with this.” [laughs]

And we had fights at meetings too, so it was an interesting time. We learned that this ideal that all women could work with each other was a crazy essentialist idea that we were disabused of very early on.

Not everyone could go out and talk; they were shy. Some people were good at doing research. Some people were better at writing copy. And some people did not want to go out and put up posters; that, in some ways, was a litmus test.

Rail: So how many still participate? The reason I’m asking about numbers is because I’m following your lead of valuing data.

“Kollwitz”: So Frida and I have been there from the very beginning until all these decades later and in every way. But the other people we work with now: one has been around for 10 years; one, they’ve been around for all kinds of different time periods. And well, I guess that’s all I have to say about that. We’ve always been there. People have come in and out, and we always have. We’ve had some fantastic members, and we do today as well.

Rail: So is that a handful, a dozen, or more, or less?

“Kollwitz”: It cannot work with a dozen people. We learned that in the beginning. You just can’t create a work that’s meaningful with so many people. It’s just so hard for people to agree. Understandably. Sometimes someone would invite 10 people in or something later on, but in general, we’ve been small at any one time. That’s how we can get this work done.

“Kahlo”: I would say, Joan, your fantasy is probably a lot more interesting than the reality.

Rail: I don’t have a fantasy.

“Kollwitz”: I was just going to say that. I bet you don't have a fantasy.

Rail: I’m trying to understand how the Guerrilla Girls’ work gets done and how many collaborate (or don’t) in order to get it done. What I’d like to know from you is what you think is a workable if not necessarily a comfortable number in order to work collaboratively.

“Kahlo”: Well, if it was a project that had three or four different kinds of labor, like research, copywriting, design, distribution, putting up the posters, and if we could sort of have a division of labor according to skills that would work.

Rail: Collecting and analyzing data has long been part of census taking, advertising and marketing as well as political campaigns. In the past 15 years or so huge amounts of data are being collected, culled, and also sold as a commodity—data mining is an apt term—and is a mega industry at this point. Early on as Guerrilla Girls you saw the value of data, though not in the make-a-buck-from -it sense but as educational information and also as opinion-changing ballast. How did your work as data gatherers come about ?

“Kollwitz”: It really started at the beginning with those first posters. They all had lists or statistics. When we saw that that worked, we always tried to prove our case with some line on the bottom—a tag line, a copy line, etcetera. We’d have an outrageous headline, outrageous images, and then prove our case with data.

“Kahlo”: It was really hard to find the statistics early on, Joan. It’s much easier now because there are websites and indexes, but when we first started, it wasn’t easy to get those statistics unless you called up the galleries or you called up the museums. It was really hard. And I remember when we did Hot Flashes—

Rail: —the newsprint publication you put out in 1993–1994—

“Kahlo”: Yes. We did a whole issue of Hot Flashes about the arts coverage in the New York Times. We had to go to the New York Public Library and look through microfiche—a whole year of microfiche issues of the Times. I think I killed my eyesight doing that. We would very carefully make the count. That was not easy at all. Now you can sit and do it on the internet.

It was really hard to find the museum stats. We would have to go to the museums and buy their bulletins and go through their bulletins because that was one of the few places where there was a record of all the shows. There wasn’t the kind of archival information that you find now. And it was like a breath of fresh air to be able to go to a website and actually get the statistics from the institution, so it was irrefutable.

Everybody thought that we were collecting data all the time. They really thought that they could ask us what the latest data was about representation of women and artists of color in the art market. And also, the auction market was really hard, really hard to research because all that information was so confidential. It’s not so much now, but what was my point? It is so much easier now to get that information, and we get it very, very quickly. But we only went after the stats that we needed. We didn’t keep stats, we weren’t statisticians. They couldn’t come to us for an index. We would decide what our target was, and we would find the stats we needed for that.

Rail: Got it.

“Kahlo”: We got stats from crazy places. Like the poster we did, BUS COMPANIES ARE MORE ENLIGHTENED THAN NYC ART GALLERIES,that came from a stat that was in the New York Times and was coming from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics about the percentage of women in formerly male fields. So we had something to work with from there: the advances women were making in other professions. We found that bus companies were more enlightened than New York City art galleries. I think truck driving and welding were the only professions that were harder on women than the top 25 art galleries.

Rail: Around 1988, using notebooks to record your data, you first counted the number of women artists represented in the galleries displaying modern and contemporary art at New York’s Metropolitan Museum and compared that figure with the number of naked female bodies in the artworks on display, resulting in the Guerilla Girls 1989 poster DO WOMEN HAVE TO BE NAKED TO GET INTO THE MET. MUSEUM?

You answered the question there with: “Less than 5% of the artists in the Modern Art sections are women, but 85% of the nudes are female.” In later re-counts for re-publishing the poster in 2005 and 2012, you found these stats: in 2005, less than 3% women artists, but 83% female nudes; in 2012, less than 4% women artists, but 76% female nudes. When you returned most recently,  in September 2025, you found less than 8% women artists, but 67% female nudes.

You also returned your 2002 Hollywood billboard, THE ANATOMICALLY CORRECT OSCAR: HE’S WHITE, LIKE ALMOST EVERYONE WHO WINS!, updating the stats in 2016. What do you expect to find when you make these comparisons?

“Kollwitz”: What we usually find is that things may have gotten a little better but not better-better. These are long roads to go. Often when we do a re-count, we find nothing much has happened or improved and then we show the two together to show that there’s still a lot of complaining—or as we call it, “creative complaining”—to do.

“Kahlo”: “Professional complaining.” There is also the issue of tokenism. Early on, everyone was rushing around to show a few women, a few artists of color, a few LGBTQ artists, and we had to ask the question: “Is one so much better than none?” I don’t know that exhibitions now are as critical to look at as the economics of the art world because what the white men sell their work for compared to what white women and artists of color sell their work for—the differential is astounding.

Rail: And for this data are you looking at auction records?

“Kahlo”: Yes. If you ask the internet the question, “highest prices paid for living artists”?, up comes all kinds of information. Oftentimes, the highest prices are paid for Chinese artists, which is really interesting because it’s a world we don’t know very much about. But women and artists of color sell for a percentage of what male artists sell for.

It shows you that there may be an attempt to show more women and artists of color, but in terms of who gets the money, it undoubtedly goes to the white men, or at least the white men in our market. The Asian market is something else. Of course, that affects your ability to continue working if you don’t have the means of production, and everybody knows the high production qualities you have to have now to do contemporary art—that’s a form of inequality right there.

Rail: A 1991 Guerrilla Girl poster states: “WOMEN IN AMERICA EARN ONLY 2/3 OF WHAT MEN DO. WOMEN ARTISTS EARN ONLY 1/3 OF WHAT MEN ARTIST’S DO.” The question about the auction price differential between male and female artists today—at least in US auctions—can now be answered almost instantaneously by posing the question to Chat GPT.

“Kollwitz”: Yeah. There’s always the cream at the top. So the most successful money-making artists in galleries, they are getting similar amounts of money at the auctions because it’s still mired in these oligarchs et cetera, buying this stuff. There’s still a difference.

Rail: In 1987 the Clocktower Gallery invited the Guerrilla Girls to present a show in response to that year’s then current Whitney Biennial. I’d like to ask you about it, and also about Roberta Smith’s review of the show. At the end of a very long New York Times piece that was an end-of-season wrap up of group shows, she devoted a good amount of real estate to your exhibition. Her concluding remarks were: “Alternately, irreverent, informative, and just plain angry, this exhibition should be required viewing for anyone interested in the art world’s machinations.”

“Kahlo”: That’s great. I forgot.

“Kollwitz”: That’s so cool. And that’s what we were trying to do, and thank you, Roberta.

Rail: Who invited you to show at the Clocktower?

“Kahlo”: Tom Finkelpearl was the director of the Clocktower, and he invited us to do something, thinking that we might do like a salon des refusés and that we would choose women artists who should be in the Biennial and who weren’t.

“Kahlo”: At just about the same time as the Biennial, the

“Kollwitz”: Whitney Biennial.

“Kahlo”: We decided that we didn’t want to have to choose between women. We really weren’t curators. We were advocates for all women, not a selected group of women. We didn’t want to be associated with an aesthetic and also it would’ve broken the group up. We would’ve had arguments over who to include. So we decided instead to do an exhibition of information and information about the museum, but we didn’t tell anyone what we were doing. We didn’t tell Tom Finkelpearl that. We said, “paint the gallery black and let us in ten days before the opening and we will give you a show.” So at that point, we did all kinds of crazy last-minute research. Again, it was pre-internet, so there was a lot of gumshoeing to get the information, and we came up with some crazy exhibits and diagrams on the walls. Have you seen the photographs of them, Joan?

Rail: I have.

“Kahlo”: We had this crazy thing where we had a mammary gland that had a big fleshy part and then a nipple, and then an aureole, and then a dot on the aureole. We asked people to shoot darts at the mammary gland to see if they could do better than the curators, because the fleshy part of the breast represented the white men and the nipple represented-white women, and then the aureole of the nipple represented Black men, and there was a tiny little dot on the breast, and that represented Black women. So we used that funny metaphor to represent the record of the museum. And we had a color-blind test that showed how few Black women artists, Black artists at all were in the Biennials. And we also showed that the biennials were getting more selective and more white over time. And that was a backslide to us.

Rail: I don’t remember a catalogue for the Clocktower show.

“Kollwitz”: There’s a booklet, actually, not an official catalogue.

Rail: I would love you to talk about another important exhibition. The Guerrilla Girls were invited to participate in “Always A Little Further,” an exhibition at the 2005 Venice Biennale curated by Rosa Martínez, who was co-director of the Biennale. Could you please talk about how you developed the project, and the surprise you found when you arrived in Venice for the installation.

“Kahlo”: It was the first Biennale directed by women and surprise it had the largest percentage of women artists ever. So we ironically named it “The Feminist Biennale.” Our work was the first thing visitors saw when they entered the exhibition. Our installation was a room full of giant banners about the history of the Biennale and the historical museums of Venice. It was a knockout!

Rail: I believe you documented most of your actions with photographs. Was that sort of ad hoc? Whoever had a camera did it? Or was that planned?

“Kollwitz”: In the beginning, it was so random, and I wish we had more of everything, but it wasn’t too long after we formed that magazines and newspapers came a-calling, and they would document things and take pictures of things. And of course, we would take our own pictures and all of us would take different pictures. But I wish we had more of the beginning stuff.

Rail: I know that the poster for the Clocktower show GUERRILLA GIRLS REVIEW THE WHITNEY—with the photo, as you mentioned to me of “Gertrude Stein” on a stool (she’s holding a banana), which is also on the cover of the pamphlet—is in the Getty archive and has been selected for inclusion in the Getty show. I imagine I could also find the 1987 Clocktower booklet in the Guerrilla Girls Getty archive?

“Kollwitz”: I think so. I also think I have something here. Frida, you probably have something too.

“Kahlo”: I don’t have it where I am.

“Kollwitz”: It was just a little pamphlet. Let me see. I’ll try to find it.

Rail: I’d like to see that. I’d like you to talk about how some of the archive came into the collection of the Getty. I think that was pretty early on—2008. Is that about the right timeframe?

“Kollwitz”: Yes.

“Kahlo”: I think maybe something like that. Well, it was finalized in 2008, you’re right. But it was the result of some discussion we had about splitting into groups.

Rail: The original group continued to be the Guerrilla Girls, of which you both are still a part, the theater crew, Guerrilla Girls on Tour, plus the Broadband bunch, GuerrillaGirlsBroadband., aka “The Broads.” The decision was also made to place the original collective’s materials in an archive.

“Kahlo”: We worked all that out. Part of the understanding was that what was kept in storage in a specific place at a specific time had to be dispersed somewhere to an archival collection. A number of places were contacted, and the Getty offered the most advantageous arrangement. They could also guarantee that it would be well taken care of, and it would be very quickly cataloged and very quickly put online, which was really important to us. A lot of other places wanted it but didn’t have the same facilities that the Getty had.

Rail: Given that the Guerrilla Girls archive at the Getty date to ca. 2001 is the museum planning to acquire the balance at some point?

“Kollwitz”: We hope so.

Rail: Among the elements in the archive are working drawings and mock-ups for some of the posters. I didn’t know that there were different iterations of each one before it was approved by the group, finalized, and printed.

The show How to Be a Guerrilla Girl will open at the Getty on November 18, 2025. Though it has some outside loans,  it is based on the archives of the Guerrilla Girls that the Getty Research Institute [GRI].

“Kollwitz”: Yes, and this is their show. There’s all kinds of things in there. Things that never happened. Prep for things that did happen. There’s tons of interesting letters. A lot we haven’t looked at for decades.

“Kahlo”: And it’s all pre-digital. Now, so much of what we do is online, in computers and hard drives, and not as much paper at all. The Getty material is a real paper archive. A very classical archive.

“Kollwitz”: They also have all the videos we did up to that time and things people sent us. The show has a really cool design. The Getty show is about our process of making work, not necessarily the work itself. At the same time, they’ve asked us to do a big installation in the atrium, right after you go in the door of the GRI. And we’ve been having an incredible time working on this thing. It’s going to be really out there, there, and I hope really interesting to people. And fun.

“Kahlo”: Hopefully people will talk about it.

Rail: Could you talk about it?

“Kahlo”: We’d love to talk about it. Basically, it’s going to be about the collection of the Getty, how it represents tendencies in Western art, European art, that deal with the prevalence of violence and assault.

“Kollwitz”: And in our culture at large.

“Kahlo”: And also how European art tended to aestheticize the violence and the abuse to the point where when you look at the paintings you don’t even realize what’s going on.

“Kollwitz”: Which is our culture today. Most movies and all kinds of other things today have all that stuff too. So, it’s really interesting to look at it with a big lens.

“Kahlo”: It’s just to realize that when we talk about culture, we have to talk about abuse and violence being part of the way our culture has been recorded.

“Kollwitz”: I don’t know exactly what you mean by culture, but it’s how people have behaved forever and ever, and it seeps into, of course, the art of every time.

Rail: How has the Getty reacted—or not reacted—to the proposal that you are going to do this critique of—and in—their own place? You’ve titled your GRI atrium installation Too Much Violence, Abuse & Voyeurism in Our Culture Today? Check Out What the Guerrilla Girls Found in These Old “Masterpieces.”

“Kollwitz”: As of now, they’ve accepted this. And they’ve actually gone along with it. So, this may change in the next two weeks, but it’s happening.

Rail: The Getty is working with you to produce your first “graphic,” I wouldn’t say novel, but book.

“Kollwitz”: I don’t know what to call it. A “graphic non-fiction something or other”?

“Kahlo”: I call it a “memoir.” A “graphic memoir.”

“Kollwitz”: That’s perfect, that’s much better than all the other terms they’ve been throwing at us.

Rail: What’s the narrative?

“Kollwitz”: Guerrilla Girls Forever: Our Lives of Art and Activism. That’s the title.

Rail: Who’s the graphic artist? I’m assuming it’s not either of you or any of the other Guerrilla Girls. Although I don’t know why I should be making that assumption. Are you illustrating it?

“Kollwitz”: We’re not illustrating it, but we will be collaborating with the artist, and the artist is Sabrina Jones.

Rail: You told me something about the process of working on Guerrilla Girls Forever. That the text is written first, with the illustrations done after that is complete. It sounds something like writing a script for a film. Could you talk about that in some detail?

“Kahlo”: The book title is Guerrilla Girls Forever: Our Lives of Art and Activism. It is like writing a film and like a film script, we include visual ideas for every page.

Rail: I believe the Guerrilla Girls memoir is part of a series the Getty is publishing.

“Kollwitz”: Yes. This is their third or fourth volume.

Rail: Other volumes in the series are Ruth Asawa: An Artist Takes Shape; Liberated: The Radical Art and Life of Claude Cahun; and Daring: The Life and Art of Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun. The sales listings for these best-selling books identify them as “graphic biographies.” Did you approach writing this book differently from  your others?

“Kahlo”: It’s the story of our activist work, with attitude.

Rail: Do you know the number of languages into which your works have been translated ?

“Kollwitz”: No. [laughs].

“Kahlo”: We’ll have to count. We could rattle a few off, if you want.

Rail: I would like you to count but also rattle.

“Kollwitz”: Chinese.

“Kahlo”: Malayalam.

Rail: Where is that spoken?

“Kahlo”: India.

“Kollwitz”: For books, it’s less languages.

“Kahlo”: There was a Taiwanese version of Bedside Companion.

“Kollwitz”: Every single exhibition we do in other countries with different languages, there’s always wall labels, a booklet you can read. The posters are translated too. That’s really important. Though many people speak English, particularly in the art world, we always have a booklet that has all the translations. We just did that in Bulgaria.We’ve done that many times so everything can be read by the people who live there.

“Kahlo”: Our Chinese translations are in Cantonese.

Rail: By comparison to the Guerrilla Girl works in public spaces, public forums, books are kind of private— things that you read alone or maybe in the company of other people, but mostly alone. You’ve done quite a few books. Confessions of the Guerrilla Girls in 1995; The Guerrilla Girls Bedside Companion to the History of Western Art in 1998; Bitches, Bimbos and Ball Breakers. The Guerilla Girls Illustrated Guide to Female Stereotypes in 2003; The Guerilla Girls Art Museum Activity Book in 2004 and a 2012 update; The Hysterical Herstory of Hysteria and How It Was Cured: From Ancient Times until Now in 2016; Guerrilla Girls: The Art of Behaving Badly, in 2020. And that’s not including the forthcoming “graphic memoir”: Guerrilla Girls Forever, Our Lives Of Art And Activism.

What prompted you to write books in the first place, and how did a collective have such a distinctive, consistent voice? How were the books written? Could you say something about the process and the participation of a few or many Guerrilla Girls?

“Kahlo”: I think the desire to write a book came as a response to what we had done before—single image posters that had a single topic. They were put up; they were over. We really wanted to deal with topics in more depth. Confessions of the Guerrilla Girls (Perennial, 1995) was a compilation of our work, our attitudes. We had interviews with each other. We had love letters, hate mail, projected projects. That was just a summary of our first years.

The art history book, The Guerrilla Girls’ Bedside Companion to the History of Western Art [Penguin Books, 1998], came out of just the sort of lack of information about women artists. They were talked about in terms of the lack of something in the lives of women artists and not talked about in terms of what they did have. It was assuming there were never women of note throughout art history and that just wasn’t true; we found that there were a lot. Oftentimes, they were very successful in their lifetimes but were written out of art history by 19^th-century art historians.

We wanted to resurrect the history of these artists and talk about the idea that there were women artists in Western art history, because everyone thought that there weren’t. And it was really exciting to do that. For me personally, I was avenging my own education. Finding out what I didn’t learn and should have known.

“Kollwitz”: We needed to create a visual style to do it. Each entry, each person had a different kind of design. We were experimenting with all kinds of things for Bedside Companion.

“Kahlo”: We wanted to write an art history book that didn’t put you to sleep. [laughter].

Rail: I was also reminded that beginning your book with ancient civilizations was a nod to, a parody of, in a sense talking back to the structure and scope of Janson’s Art History —the book that pretty much defined introductory art history courses for decades from the time it was first published in 1962, and which had included no women artists until the mid-‘80s.

You yourselves did a pointed take on Janson in your Bedside Companion to the History of Western Art with your re-working Janson’s recognizable cloth cover but changing the title to History of Mostly Male Art. I’m thinking that the Janson book was revised, finally including a small number of women artists and re-published roughly around the time when the Guerrilla Girls was founded—I have to check the date.

“Kahlo”: We formed in 1985.

Rail: I checked. Women were first added in the edition published by Abrams in 1986, four years after Janson’s death. The book was revised and edited by Anthony Janson, an art historian and the son of H.W. Janson and Dora Jane Hanson, who was an art historian with an MA from Harvard.

“Kahlo”: Whitney Chadwick did a book called Women, Art, and Society [London, Thames and Hudson, 1990] that was encyclopedic, and it was a great book.

Rail: It was a great book. It also questioned the separation of art and craft. There were passages in the book that inspired me to ask her to write for the Sheila Hicks: Fifty Years exhibition catalogue. I will look again and quote some of it for you.

For example, “Why was Hesse’s use of rope exhibited in ‘art’ galleries and museums, while Claire Zeisler’s rope pieces remained in ‘craft’ galleries? Why were Jackie Winsor’s grids ‘art’ and Lia Cook’s grids ‘craft?’ As some distinctions between ‘art’ and ‘craft’ seemed to break down, or at least fray around the edges, why did some women prefer to continue creating within the ‘fabric structure process’ while others sought to abolish the distinction between ‘craft’ and ‘art.’" That's from the sixth edition of Whitney Chadwick's Women, Art, and Society. 

“Kahlo”: We wanted to write it unlike any other art history book. We made sure that everything we talked about was illustrated on the same page. It wasn’t a lot of original research; it was just original attitudes. That’s why we don’t even have footnotes in that book. We have a bibliography at the end, but we don’t have any footnotes.

“Kollwitz”: People are writing books now that take these things into consideration. It’s a different time.

“Kahlo”: Katy Hessel did write the book The Story of Art Without Men [W.W. Norton & Company, 2023] [laughter] It is a much more earnest book than ours is. We were intentionally irreverent.

Rail: From the beginning your call words were “conscience of the art world” and added “a public service message from the Guerrilla Girls.”

“Kollwitz”: “Conscience of the art world” was right away, and that was a great way to get people to sit up when they looked at this thing. Who did this? I think it says a lot without banging you over the head with it. And we used that for a long time.

Rail: And the “public service message”?

“Kahlo”: That was making fun of public service announcements on your TV. We were using the language of advertising, the kind of language you are surrounded by in your everyday life. It wasn’t art jargon. We had to unlearn art jargon.

“Kollwitz”: All our work uses the strategies of advertising, not just some similarities of language.

Rail: Could you talk about inspirations for the style or substance or tone of your posters and other works?

“Kahlo”: That’s interesting. Well stand-up comedy always interested me.

“Kollwitz”: How interesting. I’m interested in the twist. You don’t just say this is bad. You find some kind of really twisted way into it and humor always helps if you can put that in too. That catches people’s attention. And then they keep going with it. And hopefully can change how they think about things a little bit. Mad magazine is such a perfect example of that—how to twist things around. And Mad magazine has hugely influenced many artists. I could give you the names of super well-known artists who also went on a different kind of path, and it certainly influenced me from the time I was a kid.

“Kahlo”: I remember studying all the political cartoon work in the 19th century. You know, Daumier and all of those people, artists in their own right who also did political cartooning. Caricatures always interested me. Not so much comic books but single image political cartoons.

Rail: Anonymity was always important for the Guerrilla Girls. Is it still important? Some of you have been outed I believe.

“Kollwitz”: Pretty much everybody has been outed or is out, and I don’t think it’s important the way it was, but it’s certainly important to not make it about who we are personally. So our pseudonyms, we’re attached to our pseudonyms. We use them whatever we’re doing. But many people who left the group a long time ago are out and almost everyone is out. People come up to us and say they know. I don’t know how they know. We’re not trying to make that happen, but I think that part is really over. And what’s amazing about it is it doesn’t matter anymore because the Guerrilla Girls are so much more powerful than knowing any one person’s name.

“Kahlo”: Anonymity has had its place all through American history. You know our revolution was fought by men who had pseudonyms-—Alexander Hamilton, Benjamin Franklin. I mean it was a very important technique in speaking truth to power without personalizing the message.

Rail: I believe there was one circumstance where the Guerrilla Girls themselves have revealed the identity of members.

“Kahlo”: Oh, that poster. Well, we may or may not be on that poster [GUERRILLA GIRLS’ IDENTITIES EXPOSED!, 1991] but we were thinking a lot about how a lot of women in France in the late sixties said they had abortions, famous women, to sort of, in a way taunt the authorities to act on them. And so we just wanted to put it out to our supporters and ask them if they would say they were Guerrilla Girls, just to, in a way, let the art world and the-powers-that-be know that there were a lot of us out there, a lot of people who supported us and who would identify with us at the same time.

“Kollwitz”: Doesn’t that poster say, “Just Call Us Guerrilla Girls”? We are, all these people are, Guerilla Girls.

Rail: I wasn’t actually thinking of that 1991 poster—Guerrilla Girls Exposed! or the related 1990 drawing Guerrilla Girls Identities Revealed! I was thinking of a practice by the Guerrilla Girls, please correct me if I’m wrong, that it was OK, even fine, to release the names of members upon their death.

“Kollwitz”: Well, that was a long-time-ago thing that we always had.

Rail: Could you please talk about that? I don’t know how that works.

“Kollwitz”: If you look at people who are in the group, if you look at their websites, almost everyone mentions it now and it doesn’t matter. The Guerrilla Girls’ group is more important than any one of us.

Rail: I get it. What I’m saying is that I didn’t realize, actually I was surprised to learn, that even in the years when anonymity was so important, the circumstance in which the Guerrilla Girls were saying, after someone’s death, yes, this person was a member. I was thinking perhaps in addition to a possible sidebar of the pseudonyms (only) used over the years as a kind of honor roll, not to mention study guide, would it be OK to have another sidebar, in memorium, identifying these late Guerrilla Girls?

“Kahlo”: We should do it. Yes. Although I can think of some who admitted it in their obituaries and a few people who were identified in theirs as Guerrilla Girls who weren’t.

Rail: That’s a compliment in some crazy way. I had thought way back when, in fact, that anyone could declare themselves a Guerrilla Girl, anyone who identified with what you were doing and why you were doing it. I only learned about a kind of invited membership in reading interviews with various Guerrilla Girls over the years.

“Kahlo”: For one woman, it was mentioned at her memorial service and also in the New York Times obituary that she perhaps was a Guerrilla Girl, and as supportive as she always was, I don’t recall her at a meeting. Do you?

“Kollwitz”: Well, why didn’t they fact check her? Usually they would have—should have—called us up to check.

Rail: I didn’t hear what you just said. Did you just say a name?

“Kahlo”: Marcia Tucker.

Rail: Oh.

“Kahlo”: Can we tell Joan who the deceased girls are?

“Kollwitz”: Sure.

“Kahlo”: Well, they’re May Stevens, Lorraine O’Grady, Holly Block, Emma Amos, Diane Torr. There were a few who died very early on.

Rail: I think you said there was a filmmaker.

“Kahlo”: No. She was part of the film collective that helped us do those Hollywood billboards.

“Kollwitz”: She was Sarah Jacobson. Some Hollywood people came to us and asked us to do something about the Oscars, and she was the point person on it. She was a wonderful person. She died a couple years after.

“Kahlo”: Very tragically. Very early on.

Rail: I’ve read that the policy of the Guerrilla Girls was to send out for gigs at least two of your members so as to represent different opinions. Both of you often appear together. For the Stephen Colbert show you were joined by Zubeida Agha, a name that was new to me and prompted a search about her work. How do you prep for such media appearances in comparison to those, for example, at universities?

“Kollwitz”: We prepare individually for each one.

Rail: From the outset you were set on erasing discrimination in the art world, focusing on women and artists of color. You expanded your ‘complaining’ to diverse pressing issues: and some of the most powerful Guerrilla Girls' works address abortion rights, homelessness, war. I would imagine it would have been harder to find consensus for the expanded range of issues, and also to produce effective image/messages, as many required foregoing your use of statistics and signature humor. Was it more difficult for the Guerrilla Girls to create works confronting issues beyond the art world?

“Kahlo”: No. We used the same strategies we developed for our art-world works.

Rail: The theatrical has long been a part of the original Guerrilla Girls and from the outset, the Guerrilla Girls presented gigs, many of these recorded on videos. Could you talk about your collective’s performances, actions, theatrics? They seem to be hybrids of art-history lectures, comedy sketches, vaudeville shtick (tossing bananas). Could you talk about performance vis-à-vis getting your messages out in other ways ?

“Kollwitz”: We’ve done hundreds of exhibitions and presentations about our work all over the world, at schools, museums, artists organizations, community groups and two rock and roll festivals, one organized by Yoko Ono, the other in Arkansas.

Rail: I’d also like to know about the literally “smaller” gestures, though multiplied, and that were also very effective. Could you talk about the stickers or other short messages left in museum rest rooms and elsewhere as well as the letters the Guerilla Girls write to collectors and others (and also have been exhibited scaled up to wall-size for installations)?

“Kollwitz”: We have left many messages on museum facades, in museum bathrooms, around galleries and all over the streets. Our Dear Collector letters have appeared in many public places and in many languages.

Rail: In the past year you’ve been recognized as “street artists” in a show in a gallery in Los Angeles that has specialized in the genre: Laugh, Cry, Fight! . . . with the Guerrilla Girls at Beyond the Streets Gallery. Was this really your first solo show in Los Angeles?

“Kollwitz”: First.

Rail: How did it come about?

“Kollwitz”: Roger Gastman, who runs a huge street art enterprise, collected this stuff for years and is connected to everyone in the world who ever did street art. He was the first person who really understood that at heart we are street artists. That’s how we started, and we still love the street. Now we can do giant, hundred-foot billboards and videos in addition to posters on the street.

He decided to have a gallery in L.A. a couple of years ago, and he asked us if we would do a show. And we said “Hell, yeah.” It’s been great being in his shows in New York, London, etc. and now designing this giant L.A. show, and being considered part of that world, which meant a lot to us. We could do whatever we wanted to do. And we did. I think he should have left it up for like five years.

[laughter]

Rail: Around the same time as your LA show, you were in a group show in Korea, opened an exhibition at a gallery at St. Lawrence University, and you had your first solo gallery show in New York.

“Kahlo”: We just send out the digital files and the institution or the gallery or the organization can install them however they want and that kind of makes them collaborators with us. The New York show was at Hannah Traore Gallery. Hannah wrote to us about a year ago and so we rented her one of our digital shows. She didn’t show all the pieces; it was called Discrimi-NATION. At any one time we have digital shows that we send out, and at any one time there are five Guerrilla Girl shows all over the world.

Rail: The full title was Discrimi-NATION: Guerrilla Girls on Bias, Money, and Art.

“Kahlo”: It was a selection of our work that had to do with racial discrimination because Hannah Traore is particularly interested in showing artists of color. She made a great selection of pieces, and we helped her with the installation a little. It got a lot of attention. And a lot of people got to see the show.

“Kahlo”: It was a selection of our work that had to do with racial discrimination because Hannah Traore is particularly interested in showing artists of color. She made a great selection of pieces, and we helped her with the installation a little. It got a lot of attention. And a lot of people got to see the show.

Rail:  In the Hannah Traore show you had a very large, unusually vertical format poster, an art-historical piece that you completed in 2023, GUERRILLA GIRLS REALITY CHECK: THE HUDSON RIVER SCHOOL.

“Kollwitz”: We did the Hudson River School poster for the exhibition “Women Reframe the American Landscape” at the Thomas Cole foundation [Women Reframe the American Landscape: Susie Barstow & Her Circle / Contemporary Practices,  May 6-Oct. 29, 2023; Thomas Cole National Historic Site, Catskill, New York]. It’s a show of women landscape painters who worked either alongside the Hudson River School Painters or in their shadow and were never recognized and also the work of contemporary women artists who dealt with the landscape. We decided to interrogate the history of Hudson River School paintings as an aesthetic fantasy of what the American landscape really was at the time of the paintings. The paintings presented an idea of wilderness that ignored the fact that indigenous people had lived there for millennia. Landscape painters of color were excluded as well as women. And, finally, most of the landscapes they painted as pristine were in fact in the process of being exploited and industrialized—industrialized by the very robber barons who bought the paintings.

“Kahlo”: I was just at the Thomas Cole foundation this week and they are continuing their examination of the context of Thomas Cole. They’re not like a lot of other museums and organizations that are built around a heroic or singular figure. They’re really looking at the context that Thomas Cole lived in. And what his household was like, what his family did, what happened after his life. It’s a great explosion of the great man idea of history to realize history is created by more than just a few heroes.

On view was another show they organized, Emily Cole: Ceramics, Flora & Contemporary Responses. They discovered that Thomas Cole’s daughter Emily—he died young, and she had to make a living—was an exquisite painter of watercolors. She was a botanical illustrator. She did china painting—that’s how she survived. She could translate her beautiful illustrations onto china and she sold them.

“Kahlo”: It was a really interesting show. I really applaud their attempts to expand their understanding of who Thomas Cole was.

Rail: How is the ongoing work of the Guerrilla Girls supported? The Guerrilla Girls have funded their work in part by designing and selling merch. I believe there are some 40 items on your website store, some of which have sold out.

“Kahlo”: We’ve been kept alive by colleges and universities—us speaking. Not unlike the 19th-century feminists Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony and Sojourner Truth. They made their livings by touring and giving talks. So, we’re not so far outside of that tradition. That’s changing due to the clamping down of DEI [Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion] programs. We sort of bypassed the gallery situation because collectors aren’t interested in our work. It’s not valuable enough because it’s not unique. They can’t buy anything other people don’t own. How many portfolios have we sold, Käthe?

“Kollwitz”: I don’t think it’s a hundred but it’s . . . I don’t know. I’d have to look it up.

“Kahlo”: We went directly to museums. We skipped the art market on the collector level and went directly to museums with our portfolios because it’s really a piece of art history that they buy. It’s not a unique, valuable artwork but it’s a piece of history they want in their collection.

Rail: When you say they bought a piece of history, it’s important to say that the Guerrilla Girls, as a collective, does not define itself as an artist (as some duos or groups do) but rather as an assembly of individuals—artists and others—working together differently for different activist projects. At the same time, the works by this group of individuals, created in a variety of mediums, are catalogued and titled as artworks, and the Guerilla Girls has been given artist’s memberships to such museums as The Met—privileges that go to makers of works in the permanent collections.

“Kahlo”: A lot of teaching museums bought our work first—Dartmouth, Princeton, Yale, Utah State, because the students actually use the work. What we’d like to do is have a Guerrilla Girls Museum in New York for a year and have a space where all our work is shown, not a selection. An encyclopedic display of the work would be great. Not forever. Because there is a tyranny to that, something being forever. But it would be a great idea.

We’d love to find a sponsor who could do that. And we’d like to have an independent space. We’ve had shows at the Brooklyn Museum; we’ve been in small portions of the Whitney. The Met finally decided that they’d actually acknowledge our DO WOMEN HAVE TO BE NAKED TO GET INTO THE MET. MUSEUM? They really are into it.

But they’re always asking us to make favors for their benefit. Hilarious. And when we ask them to pay for it, it’s like the last we hear from them.

It should be noted that what you call “the poster that changed it all”—DO WOMEN HAVE TO BE NAKED TO GET INTO THE MET. MUSEUM? has a complicated and fascinating history. It was originally planned as a billboard, commissioned by the Public Art Fund, which rejected the mock-up. You then issued it as a poster, and you have returned to it a number of times to update the poster’s  stats, most recently in September 2025.  Before I ask you specifically about that, I’d like to go into some detail for the benefit of Rail readers. “Käthe” recounted in a 2008 interview that the mock-up was rejected soon after it was submitted.“Immediately, they sent it back and said, ‘We think you should work on this a little bit more because the idea is not very clear.’” And “Frida” followed in the same interview with: “But it was pretty clear to us that they were not prepared to attack a major institution. So we decided, to hell with them; we weren’t going to be censored; we weren’t going to redo it to make them [accept it]. So we said, ‘All right, we’ll just withdraw it.’ So we rented advertising [space] in the [city] buses in Lower Manhattan, and it became a bus ad.”

It ran into problems there as well. “Kahlo” noted: “We got a lot of press about it, and after a month, we wanted to renew the contract. At that point, the MTA [Metropolitan Transit Authority] said, ‘Sorry, we can’t give it to you for another month.’ And we said, ‘What do you mean? We’ve got the money. Let’s do it.’ It didn’t cost very much. Their reply, ‘Well, we’ve had some complaints that the image is obscene.' I said, ‘What do you mean it’s obscene? {It’s an image from art history.} [Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres’ 1814 Grande Odalisque] There are underwear ads in the bus {that show a lot more}.’ And they said, ‘Well, it’s not the naked figure that bothers us.’ And I said, ‘Well, what else is it?’ And they said, ‘It’s what she has in her hand.” “Käthe” said: ‘Which was the handle of a fan.’ Frida added: ‘So I said, "It’s a fan.’ And they said, ‘It doesn’t look a fan to us.’ [Laughs.] They thought it was a penis! (Archives of American Art, “Oral history interview with Guerrilla Girls Frida Kahlo and Käthe Kollwitz,” conducted by Judith Olch Richards, 2008 Jan. 19-Mar. 9).

So the Guerilla Girls then produced it as a poster for the street, and they’ve since issued this, their most famous work, also on a range of objects—skate decks, beach towels, mugs, stickers, postcards, and wall installations, in many languages. The Met acquired one of the posters in 2021 as a gift of Scott, Lauren, and Lily Nussbaum.

The Guerrilla Girls returned to the Met to re-count the statistics in 2005, 2012, and 2025. In 1989 they had found Less than 5% of the artists in the Modern Art sections are women, but 85% of the nudes are female.” The stats as noted before: In 2005 less than 3% women artists, 83% female nudes; in 2012, Less than 4% women artists, 76% female nudes; and in 2025, Less than 8% women artists, but 67% female nudes.

“Kollwitz”: The Met hasn’t collected any of the other work, but they’re really into that.

Rail: To follow up on your comment about “tyranny” and “up forever.” The membership of the Guerrilla Girls has always been fluid. Do you expect this collective, the original Guerrilla Girls, to live on or do you expect it to—or plan for it to— “sundown” at a certain point?

“Kollwitz”: To me, I feel that the Guerrilla Girls group ends when we die, but the works will always be available online. And other artists will keep up the pressure. And do it creatively and convincingly, just like us. But I think this work needs to end with us.

“Kahlo”: I think we have different ideas about that. I believe in transfiguration. You’ll be back. Or maybe reincarnation. I would like to see it reincarnated. I would hate to see the ambition and the vision be gone, but the work lives on forever.

“Kollwitz”: How can you work with someone forever?

“Kahlo”: There could be problems in the future too. I think that especially now because all the advances that have sort of been made in feminism and women’s rights and also civil rights are being set back. Even if our work is remembered, it’s going to be remembered as something that happened in the past. I would like to see continual pressure live on because—

“Kollwitz”:—it will live on. We can’t live forever.

“Kahlo”: No.

“Kollwitz”: No one else could—

“Kahlo”: Joan, this is probably a conversation that Käthe and I should have.

Rail: You can talk about it another time. Perhaps we could add whatever you next come up with. I like that even you two don’t agree—because in any relationship there are serious disagreements—though your vision of Guerilla Girls has lasted for forty years. And how you’ve lasted despite differences is really something, and I think people would want to know how does a collective fight it out and survive.

There have been points in the Guerrilla Girls history where there were profound disagreements (about the mission and your own leadership roles), and the group did divide, it didn’t hold together. Now, as noted before, there is the continuation of the original group, Guerrilla Girls, in which you both still play leading parts; Guerrilla Girls on Tour; and GuerrillaGirlsBroadband, whose archive is in the Fales Collection, New York University; the latter two have now been at work for some twenty-four years. I’d like to ask those two collectives at some point what has contributed to their continued existence as they reframe parts of the Guerrilla Girls story. For now, what has contributed to the vitality and the existence of your group?

“Kahlo”: Persistence. You’ve got to be persistent. For me, personally, persistence is my tragic flaw, in art and in life. And I think it’s worked for the Guerrilla Girls.

Rail: One Guerrilla Girl chose as her pseudonym, Guerilla Girl 1. That name invoked all women artists working without public acclaim. It seemed to underscore and amplify the well-known phrase “Anonymous was a woman.” At least one Guerrilla Girl identified herself and published a memoir UN/MASKED: Memoirs of a Guerrilla Girl on Tour, by Donna Kaz [Skyhorse, 2016] .

“Kollwitz”: Right, right. Yes. Everyone who has been part of it is doing things like that. And of course their part of it makes a difference.

“Kahlo”: Her real interest was theater. She always wanted to do her own theater pieces. So it was always a little bit at odds with the rest of the group, and it was fine for her to go off and do her own thing.

Rail: In addition to persistence is there any other recommendation or recollection or thought you can give to collectives that want to keep going? Or even couples?

“Kollwitz”: Yes. We now have our therapy degrees, so we’re happy to talk. No group lasts forever and often I feel we’re just lucky to be able to do this work. It’s so wonderful to do it. We’re dealing with horrible things and it’s a huge amount of pressure, but to try to make some inroads during this horrible time in our country, we’re just lucky to be able to do what we do and we try our best.

Rail: What do you think has been your most effective action?

“Kollwitz”: Oh my god.

“Kahlo”: Every month I have a different idea.

“Kollwitz”: I’d have to think about that. I mean I think it’s the big package all together that’s added up to something.

“Kahlo”: For me, writing Bedside Companion was really personally fulfilling because it went against everything I learned when I studied art history. I just wish I could have shown it to some of my professors, especially the one who told me that I should not write my thesis on Black artists.

“Kollwitz”: What a world.

Rail: Given the terrible setbacks of the past few years—vanishing abortion rights, increasing racism and sexism, attacks on affirmative action, the most recent onslaught against DEI programs in every domain, attacks on the press and on freedom of speech, censorship, illegal arrests and deportations—so much remains to combat. What’s next for the Guerrilla Girls?

“Kollwitz”: We’re just going to keep on going. We’re not giving up. Nobody should give up. We have been in this fight for decades and decades now and we’re going to continue to try to change people’s minds about things.

“Kahlo”: When we first started in the ’80s we all remember who the president was. It was Ronald Reagan, and it was interesting. Every time there was a Republican in office we had so much more work to do. Almost like bad news was good news to us. When you’re a professional complainer, you have so much more to complain about.

Right now, I’m not sure we have structures in place to protect us. That’s what always made us different from, say, Pussy Riot and from artists in Iran or Turkey or Russia, who could go to jail for their work. I always worked with the assumption that I had freedom of speech and that I could say whatever I wanted without any kind of retaliation, so I’m really afraid that that sense of security is gone.

What I’m really waiting for in the art world is to see what happens to the art market because a lot of these billionaire art collectors are billionaires who are trying to control the government. Why are they interested in contemporary art that really undermines their idea of traditional values? I’m curious to see years from now what they’ll be collecting, if it’s the same kind of radical art that is part of the avant-garde now.

“Kollwitz”: I don’t know if this is true about the art market, but everyone is telling us the market is way down. Is that what you’ve heard, Joan?

Rail: Uncertainty about the overall economy and fickle changes in tariffs that are expected to keep turning up unexpectedly—all that uncertainty affects any buyer’s purchase of anything, so it’s not surprising that art collectors’ and art institutions’ would be affected, would hesitate or stall acquisitions, hoping to wait out this state of affairs.

“Kahlo”: The colonization of the art market. A lot of right-wing trustees impact American museums.There are people sitting on the board of MoMA that make their money by selling weapons of state repression, they’re responsible for polluting the rivers in South America. They monetize student loans. They’re into making students debtors. They’re doing things that don’t make the world a better place and they somehow “art wash” their reputations by giving money to cultural events and collecting art, which of course has been an instrument of investment. So, it will be really interesting to see what happens to that.

I don’t think it will change artists speaking up and wanting a better world. I think there definitely has been improvement—there are numbers on that. That really makes a difference.

Rail: Could you say how so?

“Kollwitz”: Museums are playing catch-up and they’re really trying to collect work by very diverse artists, artists of all kinds of backgrounds, artists of color, by women. And that’s a good thing. They got the message. Whether that’s going to continue now with all the problems museums and universities are facing is really hard to know. This is such a horrible time. All of our freedoms are being cut. So many things people need are being cut. As a life-long activist I feel so angry about this and it’s really hard to make inroads now when these crazy people are controlling everything.

“Kahlo”: Well it is a minority that’s figured out how to control the majority, so that’s that. I think the challenge is how do we get it back? How do the majority of us get it back?

Rail: In addition to creative complaining and making good trouble, what else?

“Kahlo”: Don’t ask permission. And don’t apologize.

“Kollwitz”: Do what we’ve always done: just keep on going. So many people in the country, and in the world, are trying to do that and somehow push that rock up a hill and we will keep doing it, you will keep doing it, and so many millions of people will keep doing it. But it’s a very tough time right now and it’s not going to be over for a long time.

“Kahlo”: Autocrats, historically, don’t like to be ridiculed. So—

“Kollwitz”: You mean everyone else does?

“Kahlo”: I’m saying, in particular. So keep up the shame, humiliation, and ridicule.