Guerrilla Girls debut in Italy at Cheap Street Poster Art Festival

The Guerrilla Girls, an anonymous feminist collective founded in New York in 1985, staged their first urban intervention in Italy on May 1, 2017, as part of the fifth edition of the Cheap Street Poster Art Festival in Bologna. Dozens of participants wearing gorilla masks gathered on Via Indipendenza to paste 25 historic posters by the collective, including the iconic image of a female nude with a gorilla mask and the slogan 'Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum?' The action was a public 'attacchinaggio' (postering) involving people of all ages. The collective, whose members adopt pseudonyms of deceased female artists like Gertrude Stein, Diane Arbus, Tina Modotti, Frida Kahlo, and Anaïs Nin, originated in reaction to the 1984 MoMA exhibition 'An International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture,' which included only 13 women out of 169 artists. Their protest at the vernissage led to the formation of the group the following year. The Cheap Street Poster Art Festival itself was founded in 2013 by a group of women. The Guerrilla Girls have since grown to over 55 activists and have staged interventions at institutions including MoMA, Tate Modern, and the 2005 Venice Biennale, which was co-curated by Rosa Martínez and María de Corral.