The Guerrilla Girls define themselves as a group of feminist activists who “use facts, humor and outrageous visuals to expose gender and ethnic bias as well as corruption in politics, art, film, and pop culture.”. Formed in 1985, the collective is known for wearing gorilla masks in its public appearances and for never revealing the identity of its members, who remain anonymous to this day. The group presents performances and promotes the exhibition and circulation of posters and other graphic materials that are vehicles of activist dissemination while continuing to exist as works of art. The poster Do women need to be naked to enter the Museum of Art of São Paulo? shows, using numerical percentages, the great contrast between the number of women artists with works in the collection compared to the number of female nudes that appear in the works on display, respectively 6% and 60%. This poster, made at MASP’s request for its retrospective exhibition in 2017, was based on the 1989 poster, Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum?, one of the most well-known works of the collective, in which the numbers were 5% and 85%, respectively. Thus, the Guerrilla Girls draw attention to the fact that, in the formation of museum collections, women were valued for the representation of their naked bodies to the detriment of their artistic productions. This discrepancy would only reinforce and maintain the position of the woman as the passive object of a masculine gaze.
— MASP Curatorial Team
