“The Guerrilla Girls’ Art Museum Activity Book” is a comic-book style call to action, and a parody of those cutesy books museums produce to teach children to respect High Culture. After sleuthing around in the galleries, board-rooms and financial portfolios of the Met, the Brooklyn Museum, the Whitney, the Guggenheim and the Museum of Modern Art, the Guerrilla Girls present seven fun and funny activities designed to encourage readers to fight discrimination, unethical behavior and conflicts of interest in museums everywhere. Included are quizzes, a connect-the-dots museum floor plan, and a do-it-yourself museum store complete with arty sex toys and t-shirts with slogans the museums don’t want you to see.
Why do museums raise hundreds of millions for new buildings, and then complain that they don’t have enough money to buy art? Why do they blow a fortune on a single painting by a white male genius when they could acquire hundreds of great works by women and people of color instead? Why do museum store execs get paid more than curators?
A bunch of anonymous females who fight discrimination with facts, humor and fake fur, The Guerrilla Girls have been re-inventing the F-word – feminism – since 1985. Using the names of dead women artists as pseudonyms, they appear in public wearing gorilla masks. They have produced over one hundred posters, stickers, books, printed projects, and actions that expose sexism, racism and corruption in the worlds of art, film, politics, and the culture at large.