The Guerrilla Girls took on the art world in ape masks. Now they’re in a Getty exhibition

A protest of New York’s Museum of Modern Art — over a 1984 exhibition that included only 13 women among a group of 169 artists — was a bit of a blip at the time.

The bigger impact was that the protestors would go on to found a long-running activist collective called the “Guerrilla Girls,” that would become known around the world for its outspoken calls for equity for women and people of color in the art world.

Now the anonymous group, who don gorilla masks and assume names of women artists of the past to maintain their anonymity, has its own exhibition at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, called “How to Be a Guerrilla Girl.” 

Though that doesn’t mean the collective is sparing the Getty when it comes to calling out how museums perpetuate inequity through their acquisitions and exhibitions.

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How the “Guerrilla Girls” got the art world’s attention

Using straightforward language, glaring statistics and humor and disseminating their messaging through protest signs, flyers, letters and postcards, eye-catching billboards and numerous media appearances, the Guerrilla Girls gained worldwide attention.

Guerrilla Girls posters on display at the "How to Be a Guerrilla Girl" exhibition at the Getty Center.

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The gorilla masks (and sometimes gloves too) didn’t hurt either. The use of the disguises grew out of one members’ confusion between the words “guerrilla” and “gorilla,” and became an essential part of the group’s collective public identity.

What’s on display in “How to Be a Guerrilla Girl”

The “How to Be a Guerrilla Girl” exhibition draws from the first 15 years of the Guerrilla Girls’ archives, which the Getty acquired in 2008, to show the stages of development — from lists and drafts to final products — of the various methods the collective has used to spread their calls for change.

"The Advantages of Being a Woman Artist" is one of the Guerrilla Girls' most well known works. Early drafts of it are included in the "How to Be a Guerrilla Girl" exhibition.

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Some of the group’s best known works are posters that read “Do women have to be naked to get into the Met[ropolitan] Museum [of Art]?” and another titled “The Advantages of Being a Woman Artist,” which lists things like “Having an escape from the art world in your [four freelance] jobs” and “Not having to undergo the embarrassment of being called a genius.”

Zanna Gilbert, one of the exhibition’s lead curators, says that while there have been many other Guerrilla Girls exhibitions, what makes this one unique is how it shows the behind the scenes work and thought processes that led up to these final products.

 “We have a lot of their brainstorming notes so you can really see the process of how they did their activism,” Gilbert says. “So we see it as a kind of toolkit for other people to learn from them.”

Not sparing the Getty from criticism

The exhibition also includes excerpts from the group’s media appearances through the years (like this one on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert in 2016) and an interactive digital display titled “What about Getty?” that reveals stats on how the Getty Museum and Research Institute measure up when it comes to the inclusion of women in collections and exhibitions over the years.

One example: “In the Getty Museum’s painting collection: 81.15% are by men, 18.03% are by anonymous, and less than 1% are by women (0.82%).”

“Institutional reflection is a strategy often used by the Guerrilla Girls when they're invited to do a project at an institution,” Kristin Juarez, also a lead curator of the exhibition, explains. “That if you're inviting the Guerrilla Girls to kind of bring what they do to your institution, you should also be open to reflecting on the work that they're doing.”

A portion of the new Guerrilla Girls work in the "How to Be a Guerrilla Girl" exhibition.

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The Getty also commissioned a new work from the Guerrilla Girls, which features their takes on the content of some of the paintings and sculptures in the Getty Collections, using cartoon speech bubbles to add commentary from the imagined perspectives of the women depicted in them.

The relevance of the Guerrilla Girls today

“ We think that this is an interesting moment, 40 years later, [when] some of the work still feels like it was made today,” Juarez says.

Taken together as a whole, she hopes the exhibition offers viewers a sense of “what it means to form a group and use your voice together.”

What to know before you go

The “How to Be a Guerrilla Girl” exhibition is open at the Getty Center now through April 12, 2026 and is presented in both English and Spanish.

Admission to the museum is free but requires a reservation. Parking is $25 ($15 after 3pm, $10 after 6pm, and free after 6pm on Saturdays). Metro bus 761 stops at the Getty Center entrance.