Robin Tewes, the Guerrilla Girl Behind the Alice Neel Mask, Revealed in Interview

In a rare interview, Robin Tewes, the painter who operated under the pseudonym Alice Neel within the anonymous feminist collective Guerrilla Girls, reveals her identity and reflects on the group's origins and tactics. Founded in 1984 in New York by seven artists, the Guerrilla Girls formed in response to MoMA's exhibition "An International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture," which included only 13 women out of 169 artists and no Black artists. Tewes explains that the collective was born from a wound—institutional indifference—and chose anonymity to avoid personal attacks, adopting names of deceased female artists. Their weapons included posters, statistical data, books, and nighttime wheat-pasting actions, targeting gender and race discrimination in the art world. Tewes, who participated until 2002, describes the group's use of humor as a tactic to make data memorable and inescapable. Her own paintings, exhibited at MoMA, the Whitney Museum, and the Drawing Center, explore domestic interiors and female psychology. She is represented by Adam Baumgold Gallery in New York and has received awards including the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award and a Gottlieb Foundation Fellowship. Tewes taught at Pace University and was a visiting artist in Europe and the US. The interview, conducted by Antonino Vela, concludes with an emotional acknowledgment of the collective's legacy.