Art Term

Guerrilla Girls

The Guerrilla Girls are a group of anonymous American female artists who seek to expose sexual and racial discrimination in the art world and the wider cultural arena

Formed in New York in the mid 1980s, Guerrilla Girls' members protect their identities by wearing gorilla masks in public and by assuming pseudonyms taken from deceased female figures.

  • Feminist art

    Feminist art is art by artists made consciously in the light of developments in feminist art theory in the early 1970s

  • Activist art

    Activist art is a term used to describe art that is grounded in the act of ‘doing’ and addresses political or social issues

  • PESTS

    PESTS was an anonymous protest and pressure group of artists operating in New York in the 1980s who aimed to expose the discrimination, exclusion and tokenism directed towards artists from racial minorities by commercial galleries and public museums

Explore this term

  • Who are the Guerrilla Girls?

    Discover more about the all female collective and their art

  • Turn left for the revolution

    Hari Kunzru

    When Jacques-Louis David allowed his famous painting The Death of Marat 1793–4 to be used in support of the Republican cause in France, he changed the meaning and power of the image forever. Since then artists’ left-wing political values have variously influenced the making of art and visual culture, from William Morris’s emphasis on hand-production values to the anonymously designed Atelier Populaire posters of 1968. To coincide with Tate Liverpool’s ground-breaking exhibition Art Turning Left: How Values Changed Making – the first to explore the impact of the Left on the production and reception of art from the French Revolution to the present day – writer Hari Kunzru charts the rich mix of artist voices and ideas across the centuries

Selected artworks in the collection

Guerrilla Girls at Tate

  • Tate Liverpool + RIBA North
    Exhibition

    Art Turning Left: How Values Changed Making 1789–2013

    8 Nov 2013 – 2 Feb 2014

    Tate Liverpool's Art Turning Left is the first exhibition to examine how the production and reception of art has been influenced by left-wing political values, from the French Revolution to the present day.

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