A giant ape has overtaken Los Angeles exhibition venue Beyond the Streets—not King Kong, but Queen Kong. The official mascot of the Guerrilla Girls, in fact. This looming inflatable crowns “Laugh, Cry, Fight,” the first-ever L.A. exhibition for the famed anonymous art collective of rebellious women.
Each member of the Guerrilla Girls assumes the name of a historic female artist. They make public appearances only wearing their iconic gorilla masks. Regarding the exhibition’s title, founding member Käthe Kollwitz told me over Zoom, “We knew the show was going to start after the election, but we didn’t know how the election was going to turn out. It just seemed like a great motto for what we do.”
Exterior view of the new Guerrilla Girls exhibition “Laugh, Cry, Fight” on view in Los Angeles. Photo: Beyond the Streets.
The Guerrilla Girls formed in 1985 in response to the show “An International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture” at New York’s Museum of Modern Art—which widely omitted women. They made posters highlighting the lack of female representation in art museum collections and posted them on the streets of New York art strongholds. This was a decade before Cost and Revs popularized wheat-pasted posters as street art—but six years after Jenny Holzer papered subway stations with her Inflammatory Essays. Reactions to the stunt were swift, widespread, and spirited.
“Laugh, Cry, Fight” encompasses the many methods and messages that the Guerrilla Girls have played with over the past 39 years. “It’s not organized in any usual way,” Kollwitz said of the show. “We have this giant wall, the biggest wall in the space, which has a crazy montage of some of our old work and a lot of our very, very recent work.” That includes English and Spanish editions of their infamous 1989 poster “Do women have to be naked to get into the Met?” which exposes the disparity between female artists and nudes in museums. A 1988 poster cites the “advantages” of being a woman artist, “which, of course, are all disadvantages,” Kollwitz noted.
Installation view, featuring posters from the Guerrilla Girls’s history. Photo: Beyond the Streets.
Since then, museums have started “casting a wider net,” as Kollwitz put it, by diversifying the artworks they exhibit. The Guerrilla Girls have played a real part in this shift. Ten years ago, they inspired the Uffizi Gallery to make material advancements, and in 2008, the collective confronted the Tate Modern’s chief curator, Frances Morris. “You have completely changed my mind, and I am changing this institution,” Morris reportedly responded. “And she did,” Kollwitz said. “It’s quite incredible.”
Such real shifts have empowered the Guerrilla Girls to tackle wider social issues, like homelessness and inequality in the film industry. The collective has also turned its gaze towards art world machinations that materially impact the rest of the world, like the way rich museum donors use their art collections to enhance their wealth. Last year, for example, the collective stationed a nine-foot-tall monument bearing updates to its 1990 museum code of ethics outside New York’s premier museums. The sculpture, which states “thou shalt honor thine employees” and “not consort with art dealers or collectors who commit tax evasion,” appears in “Laugh, Cry, Fight”—alongside new works like Meet The Creeps Who Stripped Our Abortion Rights (2022).
Interior, featuring a vitrine of ephemera. Photo: Beyond the Streets.
Despite their outsized reputation, the Guerrilla Girls aren’t a large group. Too many cooks would impede their efforts in the kitchen. “Our dirty little secret is that while we’ve had over 60 members, at any one time, we’re very small,” Kollwitz said. They typically have fewer than 10 members at once, she said, adding, “That’s how you get things going.”
But, while they don’t recruit new Guerrilla Girls, they would like fans to copy them. Although the group began in the streets, most of their projects—ironically, or perhaps fittingly—take place in museums. Beyond The Streets, meanwhile, is a different kind of institution—one that attracts the fine art crowd as well as those beyond it, from sneakerheads to Instagram girlies.
Installation view, featuring their Complaint Department. Photo: Beyond the Streets.
Two installations at “Laugh, Cry, Fight” invite participation—a photo booth and an iteration of the Guerrilla Girls’ Complaint Department, where guests write what they’d like to change about society. “I would say it took about one hour for the entire thing to be totally filled up,” Kollwitz said. “We are used to that. People want to have their say, and they should.”
“Laugh, Cry, Fight” is on view through January 18, 2025 at Beyond the Streets, 434 N La Brea Ave., Los Angeles.