A.K.A.: A Guerrilla Girl autographed a book for a fan at the Art Museum reception held after their presentation. The Guerrilla Girls remain anonymous, but assume the names of dead women artists. (Photo by Emily Reeves)

There were “Guerrillas Girls in Our Midst” as two members of the activist — and anonymous — group of artists appeared in McCosh Hall last week, courtesy of the Princeton University Art Museum’s Student Advisory Board.

Gloria Gaynor’s rendition of “I Will Survive” set the appropriate tone for the program as many women — particularly young women — filed into McCosh 50. Given the Guerrilla’s Girls‘ reputation for making their paradigm-changing points in powerful (but always humorous) ways, it was easy to imagine that some of the significantly fewer men who joined the audience looked a little abashed as they entered the room.

The Guerrilla Girls’ fight against sexism, racism, and other forms of discrimination in politics, art, and pop culture, has succeeded thanks to the blend of a hilarious approach with a serious purpose; the thorough research they do before pointing out injustices; and their sheer tenacity. Their success recently in getting more women artists’ work into museums around the world was thanks, in part, to a campaign that asked the question, “Do women have to be naked to get into the Metropolitan Art Museum?”

As for the way women are portrayed in museums, a “weenie count,” compiled by members of the group who went to art museums and counted the male to female subject ratio in artworks showed that only five per cent of the subjects were women and 83 per cent of the images of women displayed were nude.

At last week’s program, the two Girls spoke for over an hour through mouthpieces in the gorilla masks they wear to maintain anonymity. They described how the group, which emerged as in-your-face activists in the 1980s, positioned anti-film industry billboards in Hollywood and created an “anatomically correct Oscar” just in time for the Academy Awards one year. They have created large scale projects for the Venice Biennale, “dissed the Museum of Modern Art at its own Feminist Futures Symposium, examined the museums of Washington, D.C. in a full page in the Washington Post, and exhibited large-scale posters and banners in Athens, Bilbao, Montreal, Rotterdam, Sarajevo, and Shanghai.”

Guerrilla Girls’ work now appears in major museums throughout the world. “What do you do when the system embraces you?” asked one of the Girls, half-jokingly. There is, of course, still work to be done (the statistics remain “stunnning”), and material culturalists would do well to pay attention to the books, posters, billboards, handouts, and stickers ingeniously used by the Girls to get their message across.

In the last few years, representatives of the Guerrilla Girls have appeared at over 90 universities and museums. The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, Bitch, Artforum, NPR, BBC, CBC, and many feminist texts have cited their work. Their own publications include The Guerrilla Girls’ Bedside Companion to the History of Western Art, and Bitches, Bimbos and Ballbreakers: The Guerrilla Girls’ Guide to Female Stereotypes. Their work extends to collaborations with other pro rights organizations like Amnesty International’s Stop Violence Against Women Campaign in the United Kingdom, and Greenpeace, the environmental non-profit. Their plans to subvert angry politicians include the creation of an “estrogen bomb.”

The Girls’ described their fight for feminism as “one of the great civil rights movements of our time.” Encouraging audience members to become activists, they reminded them not to “forget to have fun along the way.”

To learn more about the Guerrilla Girls visit www.guerrillagirls.com. On the website and in their performance, it should be noted, the Guerrilla Girls make a point of distinguishing themselves from the theater collective, Guerrilla Girls on Tour, and members of GuerrillaGirlsBroadband, who deal with internet and workplace issues.