The Getty Research Institute announced this week that they have acquired thirty to forty boxes of papers that include artwork, documents, and correspondence from the Guerrilla Girls feminist art collective dating between 1985 and 2000. The Guerrilla Girls were founded in 1985 in New York City as a collective that aimed to fight gender and race based discrimination in the art world.
Founding member ‘Kathe Kollwitz’ told The Independent “We’ve been keeping this stuff in boxes in a storage room in New York for years, and have been thinking about doing something with it for a long time….It’s mostly correspondence, photos, fan mail, hate mail, sketches, notes on projects, and drafts of some of our books. We are now taught in many universities as part of art history and sociology courses and the Getty will be able to properly catalogue it and put it online to make it accessible.”
Guerrilla Girls members are anonymous and maintained their anonymity by wearing gorilla masks when in public and by adopting the names of women artists instead of using their own. Kathe Kollwitz, for example, is actually a German artist known for her etchings, woodcuts, lithographs, and sculpture.
