OPENING NOVEMBER 18

Coinciding with the Guerrilla Girls’ 40th anniversary, “How to Be a Guerrilla Girl,” on view Nov. 18 through April 12, 2026, offers a rare, behind-the-scenes look into the inner workings of the feminist art collective. Drawing from the Getty Research Institute’s Guerrilla Girls archive, the exhibition highlights the strategies— anonymity, data gathering, protest actions, culture jamming, and grassroots distribution—that have defined the group’s practice since the mid-1980s.

The Guerrilla Girls have created a newly-commissioned work for the exhibition that explores the Getty’s own collection of European painting and sculpture. Using comic strip style speech bubbles, they reimagine the voices of women represented in these artworks through a twenty-first century lens. The commission exposes deeply rooted biases in the representation of women in Guerilla Girls characteristic witty style.

“The Getty Research Institute is delighted to present this exhibition marking four decades of Guerrilla Girl art and activism. The group’s archive allows us to understand the crucial role they have played in the art world and the strategic thinking and collective labor behind their most famous interventions, while introducing us to lesser-known aspects of the groups’ practice,” says Andrew Perchuk, interim director of the Getty Research Institute.

The exhibition offers a sustained look into the archive, which documents the first two decades of Guerrilla Girls activity, and was acquired in 2008. The archive was amassed as the collective worked on projects, with members of the group depositing working drafts of posters, fan mail, photo shoots, internal correspondence, video and audio cassettes, and data tallies at a shared space. In the exhibition, the Guerrilla Girls’ best-known posters will be seen alongside this material shedding light on the Guerrilla Girls’ practice as it developed within the social and cultural context of the late 20th-Century culture wars. Through this periodization, the show will contextualize their understandings of gender and intersectional feminism, their media practices of culture jamming, and their critical approach to art history.

“The Guerrilla Girls give us a blueprint for art and activism that is incredibly effective. Our goal is to show visitors the toolkit for artistic activism developed by the Guerrilla Girls,and that it can still be applied today, whatever the issues they care about may be,” says two of the exhibition’s curators Zanna Gilbert and Kristin Juarez.

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