Awards
2004 Frank Jewett Mather Award
The Guerrilla Girls
The Guerrilla Girls
The Frank Jewett Mather Award, first presented in 1963 for art journalism, is awarded for published art criticism that has appeared in whole or in part in North American publications. This year, CAA honors the Guerrilla Girls.
If one purpose of criticism is to expose moribund patterns of behavior and propose new ways of thinking about the culture industry, the Guerrilla Girls are among the most successful critics to appear in recent years. Organized in 1985 to combat sexism and racism in the art world, the group has successfully carried out their unconventional and highly effective art and cultural criticism. Their recent book, Bitches, Bimbos, and Ballbreakers: The Guerrilla Girls’ Illustrated Guide to Female Stereotypes (New York: Penguin Books, 2003), joins their previous publications, The Guerrilla Girls’ Bedside Companion to the History of Western Art (New York: Penguin Books, 1998) and Confessions of the Guerrilla Girls (New York: Harpe rPerennial, 1995), in using humor to combat gender, racial, and ethnic marginalization in the art world.
Bedside Companion is a tour de force in its ambitious attempt to revise our understanding of the careers, practices, institutions, and standard models of art history and criticism. The authors discuss artists from Hildegard von Bingen and Elisabetta Sirani to Käthe Kollwitz, Augusta Savage, and Tina Modotti; they also reveal how criticism in the art world too often functions to support, rather than question, the status quo. And they demonstrate a cutting wit and an uninhibited playfulness—rare qualities in much critical writing.
The Guerrilla Girls’ books are only part of their panoply of critical activities. The group has produced more than one hundred posters, stickers, postcards, and billboards, reaching audiences well beyond the art community with a hip and sophisticated critique. Launching themselves upon a complacent arts establishment, they have maintained the tactics of anonymity and collaboration in provocative street theater, lectures, performances, and workshops conducted worldwide. They are tireless in their efforts to promote equality for women and people of color in the cultural realm, appearing in their trademark gorilla masks on television and in film. The group has been interviewed on the radio and often in the very museums whose policies they have held up for review.
Guerrilla Girls, Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum?, 1989
During the past nineteen years, the Guerrilla Girls’ work has dramatically affected curators, administrators, fellow critics, and artists. Prior to their poster campaigns in the streets of SoHo in the mid-1980s, the reality of art-world exclusiveness—whether overt or covert—with regard to gender and race was almost entirely anecdotal. The Guerrilla Girls’ statistics exposed imbalances in gallery and museum representation, media coverage, and other forms of institutional support for artists. The group also targeted the traditions of oppressive and dehumanizing imagery in art as well as the omission from art history of the contributions of women and artists of color, yet they always rely on a spirit of fun to deliver their message. They have greatly influenced those in high positions to promote change as well as students who are beginning their careers in art and art history.
The Guerrilla Girls’ posters now appear in art-history textbooks and are collected by museums across the country, and the group has received awards from the National Organization for Women, the National Library Association, the Center for the Study of Political Graphics, and the Ministry of Culture in Berlin, among others. The Guerrilla Girls now merit the distinction of the Frank Jewett Mather Award for their unique and evolving adaptation of art criticism as a vital, socially relevant, and transformative art form.
Committee: James Yood, Northwestern University, chair; Janet Koplos, Art in America; Gregory Sholette, School of the Art Institute of Chicago; and Sue Taylor, Portland State University.
