Historical Note

In 1985, a group of female artists, incensed by an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art that included 165 artists but only 17 women, founded the Guerrilla Girls. From that point on, using statistics-based, text-centric posters and billboards, the group sought to educate the art world about its own institutionalized discrimination by targeting art institutions and art critics who failed to provide women and minorities representation. The group also staged public interventions while wearing gorilla masks to protect their identities. Anonymity is a key aspect of the group's activism, and members (primarily artists) adopt the names of overlooked artists as pseudonyms.

In the late nineties, the Guerrilla Girls entered a phase during which some of its founding members split apart from the group. Disagreements over focus, financial dealings, and the future of the collective's mission led to the formation of three separate groups, all three of which still functioned as of 2013. Today, the GuerrillaGirlsBroadBand, Inc., Guerrilla Girls On Tour, Inc. (the Theatre Girls), and Guerrilla Girls, Inc. all continue to promote the objectives of the collectives.

Guerrilla Girls BroadBand was formed in 2001. While continuing the aims of the original Guerrilla Girls, it sees the world wide web as its "natural habitat". From their viewpoint, the "original Unincorporated Collective of Guerrilla Girls had come unstuck partly through a lack of agreed procedures for such things as diversity, power-sharing, and collective rights to intellectual property. The Broads set out to fix these problems and blaze a trail for future collective artistic endeavours."

Sources:

Guerrilla Girls BroadBand "about page" (ggbb.org/about) Guerrilla Girls chronology (www.guerrillagirls.com/info/index.shtml)