About GGBB
HERSTORY (Guerrilla Girls BroadBand is born. Out of Many: Many More!)
Towards the end of the 20th century, the Guerrilla Girls sought out new frontiers in their fight for truth, justice and the feminist way, forming three wings to accommodate their broadening interests. This is the site of Guerrilla Girls BroadBand, (GGBB.org) one of these sister organizations, a diverse band of next-generation feminist artists. “The Broads” use their wit, website and interactive multimedia events to combat sexism, racism and social injustice, focusing attention on such taboo subjects as workplace discrimination, armed forces recruitment tactics in schools, and abortion access.
Committed to bringing dead women artists back to life by taking their names, Guerrilla Girls BroadBand includes such fascinating characters as Gerda Taro, Umm Kulthum, Minnette De Silva, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and Josephine Baker. We are a collective of women in love with new media, at home with hacking. Taking advantage of cutting-edge web-based technologies we bring our subversive ideas and signature graphic style to a wired world.
Our first online project, Letters to Bad Bosses, got a write-up in the New York Times that sent 900,000 visitors to our site! As that article “A Stronger, More Theatrical Role for Female Activists” said: “…The new site is about audience participation.”
We still participate in the analog world through appearances (Book a Broad!), physical projects, and posters, but as we reach out and involve a greater and more diverse public in our participatory projects, the web is our natural habitat.
The Guerrilla Girls Broadband Constitution
The first thing we did when we formed in 2001 was to write a constitution. 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.
The back-story:
(to read the 2011 Art Journal article Guerrilla Girls and Guerrilla Girls Broadband: Inside Story, download a pdf by alt-clicking (option-click for Mac) here)
In 1985, a bunch 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. Dubbing ourselves “The Conscience of the Artworld,” we started making posters that bluntly stated the facts of discrimination and used humor to convey information, provoke discussion and to show that feminists can be funny. We assumed the names of dead women artists, and began wearing gorilla masks when we appeared in public, concealing our true identities and focusing on the issues rather than on our personalities.
Between 1985 and 2000, close to 100 women, working collectively and anonymously, produced posters, billboards, public actions, books and other projects to make feminism funny and fashionable. At the turn of the millennium, three separate and independent incorporated groups formed to bring fake fur and feminism to new frontiers:
GuerrillaGirlsBroadBand, Inc.
Guerrilla Girls, Inc.
Guerrilla Girls On Tour, Inc.