Guerrilla Girls Oral History Project

Transcript

Preface
The following oral history transcript is the result of a digitally recorded interview with
Guerrilla Girls Alice Neel and Gertrude Stein on December 1, 2007. The interview took
place at Independent Curators International offices in New York, New York, and was
conducted by Judith Olch Richards for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian
Institution.

The reader should bear in mind that he or she is reading a transcript of spoken, rather
than written, prose.

Interview—EXCERPT for Art Since 1980

JUDITH RICHARDS: This is Judith Richards interviewing Alice Neel and Gertrude Stein
of the Guerrilla Girls at 799 Broadway, iCI's offices, on Saturday, December 1, 2007, for
the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, disc number two.

So, let me begin. I wanted to ask you both a couple of questions, and we can go
successively. When did you, Alice Neel, join the Guerrilla Girls?

ALICE NEEL: It was way in the beginning; it was the first meeting after the founding
members. I think it was the first or second meeting, 1985. And I heard about this
incredible group, the Guerrilla Girls, saw posters and things they did in the streets, and
just was real excited about it, really - I thought it was important, wanted to be part of it.

So, I mentioned it to a few women artists that I knew, and then I got a phone call inviting
me to a meeting. And I remember when they invited me to the meeting, they blindfolded
me en route to the meeting - it was very, very mysterious.

GERTRUDE STEIN: Really?

MS. NEEL: And - yes.

MS. RICHARDS: Talk about that.

MS. NEEL: A few of the girls met me at my apartment and then we walked a little bit,
and then they put a blindfold on me and we walked a couple of blocks to the first
meeting, where it was, which - now I know where it is - where it was.
But at the - it was fun. It was - all of a sudden I was in this apartment. [They laugh.]

MS. RICHARDS: So not only were the members trying to remain anonymous, but the
location needed to -

MS. NEEL: Yes.

MS. RICHARDS: And why was that?

MS. NEEL: The anonymity was so important - it's such an important part of the success
of the group.

MS. STEIN: The element of mystery.

MS. NEEL: Absolutely.

MS. STEIN: What if you had not actually joined? Then you would be loose, out there,
telling people -

MS. NEEL: That's right, that's right, that's right.

MS. STEIN: - stuff that had happened.

MS. NEEL: I - it was barely - it was new, you know. I could speak for myself, but I know
other girls have said they felt the same way. I felt this gut need to fix something that
wasn't - it was not right, wasn't fair.

And the show ["An International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture." 1985] at
MoMA [Museum of Modern Art, New York City] was the straw that broke the camel's
back in a way, too. But you just knew that this wasn't right, what was going on, that
there was this inequality. And how do we address it; how do we approach it? What do
we do about it? And I just felt that I wanted to be - do something about it. It was part of
my life.

MS. STEIN: Well, plus, the ways that feminists had tried to protest inequality had been
seen as shrill, and sour grapes.

MS. RICHARDS: And what about your experience joining, Gertrude?

MS. STEIN: Well, I am a founding member. And there were - you know, I am going to
reveal some of the warts that are going to be revealed by other people, because I think
it is important to show the process. It was a bumpy, bumpy - we should say - bumpy
process.

MS. NEEL: Oh, yes, yes, yes.

MS. STEIN: There were seven white women sitting around a red table in Lower
Manhattan. And race was an issue that came up later, when one of the white women
took the name Frida Kahlo, who is an artist of color, and spoke on behalf of artists of
color, and that made the artists of color pretty mad. But we can get to that at a later
point.

MS. NEEL: No. We were just doing it to try to make a difference, to also satisfy our own
frustration about the problem. We didn't even know, at the time, how to go about it. So
we said, "Let's just start by counting numbers. Let's get the facts, the black-and-white
facts."

So, we went through old Art in America -

MS. STEIN: Art in America, annual issues.

MS. NEEL: - annual reports - we knew there was a problem, intuitively. But we needed
to show it. How do we do that? That was the challenge. How do we actually show it? So
it was very obvious. It was the best way to do it. We counted. And we came up with
these appalling figures of the state of women artists and artists of color.

MS. STEIN: Well, the first poster was, these galleries show no -

MS. NEEL: No women artists.

MS. STEIN: Or 10 - let's see.

MS. NEEL: I wish we had our book with us.

MS. STEIN: Next time - I didn't bring it.

MS. NEEL: Less than 10 percent, I think it was, women artists, was one of the first -

MS. STEIN: And then the next one was museum shows; is that right?

MS. NEEL: We did a report card early on.

MS. STEIN: And then, the next strategy was to put up the posters on the streets, so
they appeared anonymously overnight. And then, Saturday morning, you'd be going to
the galleries, and you would see these posters that -

MS. NEEL: Yes.

MS. STEIN: - they had put up.

MS. NEEL: Yes.

MS. RICHARDS: Were you involved personally -

MS. NEEL: Yes, oh, yes. Yes. Oh, gosh, that was another story.

MS. STEIN: Well, later, we hired men.

MS. NEEL: We did, to do it. But in the beginning, we did it.

MS. RICHARDS: Hired? You paid?

MS. STEIN: Yes, we paid -

MS. NEEL: Yes.

MS. STEIN: - men to go out and put up our posters.

MS. RICHARDS: You just hired men.

MS. STEIN: Well, yes.

MS. NEEL: It was kind of dangerous, the job, too.

MS. STEIN: Well, it was. Plus -

MS. NEEL: They needed to be put to work.

MS. STEIN: - we thought it was nice - it was retribution, you know.

MS. RICHARDS: The men -

MS. NEEL: Yes, it was making them part of it.

MS. STEIN: The women wore gorilla masks in the beginning.

MS. NEEL: Right.

MS. STEIN: As -

MS. NEEL: We were on the street. We would go out in the middle of the night. I
remember getting the buckets with the paste, and the big brooms, and it would be three
in the morning, because that's when we wouldn't be chased around by the police.

MS. RICHARDS: Were either of you ever stopped by the police?

MS. NEEL: Oh, yes, yes, yes. I remember having to drop the buckets at some point and
run like a crazy woman.

MS. STEIN: On West Broadway, right?

MS. NEEL: On West Broadway.

MS. STEIN: Yes. Outside of Leo Castelli [Gallery]?

MS. NEEL: Oh, yes.

MS. STEIN: Yes.

MS. NEEL: It was like, you know -

MS. RICHARDS: In your mask.

MS. NEEL: In the mask. You couldn't even do that now without, probably, getting shot
or arrested.

MS. RICHARDS: How did each of you pick your name?

MS. NEEL: Well, I picked my name because I -

MS. RICHARDS: Alice Neel.

MS. NEEL: - met Alice Neel. I was actually in a show with her at the Whitney Downtown
one year. And she - I just love her work. I just think she is terrific, you know. She was
fun to meet, too. She was a real cantankerous soul. She was at the opening, chain-
smoking cigarettes. She was terrific. I love her work, and then she passed away, so -

MS. STEIN: Also, you're a very good painter.

MS. NEEL: Oh, thank you.

MS. RICHARDS: And how about Gertrude Stein?

MS. STEIN: I had admired Gertrude for many, many years, all the way through graduate
school. And I thought she was doing Cubist literature. I mean, I really thought she was a
genius who was never given credit for having been a genius.

And one day, I heard that her handwriting was on view at the Library of Congress, so I
got a train ticket and went down there and looked at it. And it was like a sine wave. You
couldn't really distinguish the letters. So, Gertrude Stein, and Alice B. Toklas, actually,
should be thanked for all of her work, because somebody had to transcribe all that stuff.
MS. NEEL: Yes, it's a collaboration of sorts.

MS. RICHARDS: Do you think a - does the group have any rule about when you stop -
when you leave the group, someone else can take that same name, or is it forever your
name?

MS. STEIN: No. There have been two Ana Mendietas, as far as I know. One girl
changed her name three times.

MS. NEEL: Yes, it was organic. It was incredibly organic.

MS. STEIN: - process.

MS. NEEL: It -

MS. RICHARDS: Viral.

MS. NEEL: Yes, it worked. And we learned as we went along. And I remember there
was one point that we were having difficulty - we thought we probably could learn a lot
from white men in corporate America and how they run their business, because we
would get to this point where somebody was, like say, doing gigs. And they weren't
really good at it. And nobody had the heart to say to them, "You know, I think you would
be better doing something else," without worrying about hurting their feelings.

MS. STEIN: Yes, it was horrible. [Laughs.]

MS. NEEL: You know, we're a bunch of girls here. And we realized that, in corporate
America, I'm sure that kind of dialogue was more like, "You should do," or, "You should
be doing this," - and nobody takes it personally. So there was - I remember a discussion
about learning how to communicate in a different way.

MS. STEIN: We didn't use other models.

MS. NEEL: No, no, we didn't use any - we were inventing it and reinventing it as we
went along. And it was pretty exciting. We had a great time in the beginning; it was
wonderful.

MS. STEIN: Yes.

MS. NEEL: It was really like a happy, dysfunctional family.

MS. STEIN: So joyous.

MS. NEEL: Yes. We had a lot of laughs. It was very creative. We would sit around,
maybe because it wasn't so many of us, and we sat around and we would work on the
Advantage poster ["The Advantages of Being a Woman Artist"], for example. I think
that's one of the masterpieces of the Guerrilla Girls, because we all chipped in, and we
hammered away at it, and we kept reworking and changing it. "No, that doesn't work.
This works." And so for a long time, until we all were satisfied with it.

MS. RICHARDS: What year was that?

MS. NEEL: Early on. Was it -

MS. STEIN: Eighty-eight, I'm going to say.

MS. NEEL: We needed help.

MS. STEIN: We were out there recruiting.

MS. NEEL: Yes, we recruited, because we needed help.

MS. STEIN: And we figured out sponsorship later, that we could recruit people. If there
was a girl who was already in the group who said - for example, later on, we had a
debate about whether or not, what we - our public presentations, are they lectures or
are they performances?

Well, if they're lectures, that requires one set of skills. And if they're performances, that -
actually, there aren't any performance artists in this group, so I nominated Claude
Cahun to come in and help us out with dance steps, you know, and things - [they laugh]
- you see all these painters up there, gyrating around.

MS. NEEL: Yes. It was like breast-feeding supply and demand, the same kind of need.

MS. RICHARDS: And there was - and did you, at one point, decide how you were going
to create a more diverse group, and why, and -

MS. STEIN: Yes, there was conscious effort to -

MS. NEEL: To bring in more women of color.

MS. STEIN: - bring in artists of color. And - but the only catch was that there was a kind
of secret hierarchy that was in place that got to be the downfall of the group, I think. And
they could smell that a mile away, and they would just leave.

MS. NEEL: Yes, yes.

MS. RICHARDS: Can you talk about that secret hierarchy?

MS. STEIN: You don't want to talk about this, because you're very close friends with
one of the secret hierarchical people. [Laughs.]

MS. NEEL: I love everybody. [Laughs.]

MS. STEIN: Of the seven founders, two of them consider themselves to be the
founders. And you will interview one or both of them, so no problem. And they're going
to tell you the whole founding story, and that's fine. That's completely fine.

But at one point, there was a discussion about whether seniority would give one person
more power, more control, than newbies.

And - but the process was so much about discussion and bouncing ideas around, that it
didn't really make sense to offer somebody more power, just because they had had
more years, when a new person who had just been brought into the group in the last
week, who is young and right off the street -

MS. NEEL: And a little intimidated.

MS. STEIN: - might have - you know, might have really hot stuff.

MS. NEEL: Yes, and also a little shy about it. Yes.

MS. STEIN: Or - true. Or be shy, yes.

MS. NEEL: Yes. Yes, so - but sometimes, when the new members join, they would pull
out because they felt their voice wasn't heard, and to be heard, had to go through some
process.

MS. STEIN: I think the hierarchical thing came into play with killing off ideas that were
not deemed to be good enough, somehow. And who makes that decision?

MS. NEEL: Right.

MS. STEIN: Who decides what represents us, and the group? And battling to make sure
that your ideas were continually brought forward and discussed -

MS. NEEL: Was not comfortable -

MS. STEIN: Because there was never any agenda. There were never any minutes.
There was never any -

MS. NEEL: We did it for a while, minutes, but then it fell apart. [Laughs.]

MS. RICHARDS: So it was a -

MS. NEEL: So there it is, in a nutshell, that when that started, that need to yell, or really
make your voice heard, if there were some girls, new girls, who possibly had great
ideas, but who couldn't fight for their ideas, they were the ones that drifted away and got
pushed aside, or left.

MS. STEIN: This all sort of worked in a salutary way when, for example, we even - we
developed, designed, and produced a poster that Alice Neel objected to.

MS. NEEL: Mm-hmm [affirmative], that's true.

MS. STEIN: And then it was not ever put up on the street. So -

MS. NEEL: Right, so it worked both - yes.

MS. STEIN: Yes, it worked both ways.

MS. NEEL: If you had a strong enough point of view, and you could represent it, or want
to talk about it, sometimes you just pounded it out with everyone there.

MS. RICHARDS: As the group was expanding, did you consciously try to bring in
different generations, and potentially different viewpoints?

MS. STEIN: Later.

MS. NEEL: Mm-hmm. [Affirmative.]

MS. STEIN: Later.

MS. NEEL: Yes.

MS. STEIN: The - at the turn of the millennium, there was a - there were a bunch of new
girls who were in the group, one of whom was a webbie girl who wanted to revamp the
website, right?

MS. NEEL: Mm-hmm. [Affirmative.]

MS. STEIN: So she would ask Frida Kahlo, who had the password, every single
meeting, "Could I have the password for the website, so I can, you know, do
something?"

And we all agreed that this was time to do something with the website. But the
password never actually got conveyed, and this went on for two - count them - years.

So, as the end of the millennium was coming, the issue of power sharing became very
acute. And five of us were fired by the two founding members, and we ran off and
started a group, GuerrillaGirlsBroadBand, which then was sued because we were using
the name, Guerrilla Girls, which had been trademarked by the two founding members.

And then, there was a - you know, the lawsuit was resolved, and -

MS. RICHARDS: Well -

MS. STEIN: - we're not supposed to talk about that.

MS. RICHARDS: What were the Guerrilla Girls' names of the two founding members?

MS. STEIN: Oh. Well, the two founding members who consider themselves to be the
founding members? Frida Kahlo and Kathe Kollwitz.

And their group now, today, is called Guerrilla Girls, Inc. They incorporated as Guerrilla
Girls, Inc. And GuerrillaGirlsBroadBand is the younger, webbie girls, and totally diverse,
and totally - I'm the old one, and then there are all these kids.

MS. RICHARDS: Is the current website, GuerrillaGirls.com, run by -

MS. STEIN: Guerrilla Girls, Inc.

MS. NEEL: Inc.

MS. RICHARDS: Inc.

MS. STEIN: Sure, yes.

MS. RICHARDS: And GuerrillaGirlsBroadBand has -

MS. STEIN: Is -

MS. RICHARDS: - another website?

MS. STEIN: Right. That's on my piece of paper here.

MS. RICHARDS: Why do you -

MS. STEIN: So this is all happening right at the turn of the millennium. There was a lot
of unhappiness about - because we had never established any procedures, and we had
never developed any process for power sharing, when it became clear, after 15 years,
that the power was not going to be shared [laughs], that became the subject of the
meetings. And then the meetings were just awful.

MS. NEEL: Yes.

MS. STEIN: You know, they were really, really depressing.

MS. NEEL: And then I -

MS. RICHARDS: Alice, how long were you a member of Guerrilla Girls, original
Guerrilla Girls?

MS. NEEL: Too long. [Stein laughs.] No, I don't mean that. [Laughs.] I loved every
minute of it. No, it was enjoyable. A long time.

MS. RICHARDS: Do you remember what year you started?

MS. NEEL: I started in 1985, and - well, when I left the Girls, my own life took over in a
way that I had to take care of, too.

But also it opened up to too-large a group that weren't really, I felt, doing anything. A lot
of them were -

MS. RICHARDS: What year was that?

MS. NEEL: - complaining about their lives, or they weren't really productive. It wasn't
like the initial group, who really were focused on this.

Some new girls didn't even know the history of the Guerrilla Girls. They had little
knowledge of our history. At that point, we were very well known, and I think a lot of
them were interested in coming on because of the reputation of the Girls.

And I felt, when I would go to these meetings, that it wasn't the same kind of energy,
where we sat and we really worked at something, and we focused and were driven. We
might have fought or not agreed, but we came up with some incredibly, visually -
inspiring product. And there wasn't enough product making at that point. It was just -

MS. RICHARDS: What year was that?

MS. NEEL: - all over the place. Oh, year?

MS. STEIN: Let's see.

MS. NEEL: The early 1990s?

MS. RICHARDS: You're implying that, possibly, new members weren't involved as
visual artists, therefore there wasn't the skill and talent and passion about a visual
solution, visual -
MS. NEEL: I don't know if it was because it was visual. It might have been. I thought,
too, that maybe this was the time for the Guerrilla Girls to end. I always had a fantasy of
a going back to the jungle and reemerging as this union for artists.

Except that I do see that - especially recently, from the work of Gertrude and Frida and
the groups, that there is still a life for it, and a really important place for it, you know. I'm
sort of switching my idea about the value of it recently. When we were at the Brooklyn
Museum and received an award, it was very interesting.

But I do feel that maybe this is the time - we're at the point where maybe this is the time
to let it rest and reemerge in some other form, or another way. I think its life has had an
incredible impact, and I think the life of the Girls has now shifted, or is in transition in
some way. But I'm not sure what that is.

I'm more interested in hearing what younger women have to say. I want to hear their
voice, what they have to say about it, because they're in a whole different generation
and it's their turn.

MS. STEIN: And their views about feminism are completely different.

MS. NEEL: Very different.

MS. STEIN: Yes.

MS. RICHARDS: And did the original Guerrilla Girls - was the perception that you would
both exist and both flourish and continue on, or was there a fear that only one of you
could survive, that you were in competition?

MS. STEIN: Yes, I think there was plenty of anger and jealousy to go around, and there
was - but we got money from the original group. When the original group disappeared,
and the three wings took off at the turn of the millennium, the theater -

MS. RICHARDS: The original group disappeared?

MS. STEIN: Yes, it kind of disappeared, yes. You had left already - the old girls - there
were five old girls who were fired, right? We formed a new group, and then we got a
bunch of young recruits. That's GuerrillaGirlsBroadBand.

And then the theater girls had already left, I think. They formed Guerrilla Girls on Tour in
2000, if I'm not mistaken. I can't remember. And then Guerrilla Girls, Inc., had
incorporated as Guerrilla Girls, Inc., in 1999.

MS. RICHARDS: Do either of you want to talk about the use of posters, which has a
long historic tradition, social activism, even from the 19th century, posters - Russian
posters, all kinds of posters.
How did that become, in the beginning, the key vehicle?

MS. NEEL: Posters?

MS. RICHARDS: For your activism.

MS. STEIN: - that SoHo was a convenient broadcast point.

MS. NEEL: We had a lot of walls to put up the posters.

MS. STEIN: And so -

MS. NEEL: Right.

MS. STEIN: And it was the center of the art world at that moment.

MS. NEEL: That's right.

MS. STEIN: So we were postering in SoHo, period. And then, later, it got to be more
difficult, because -

MS. NEEL: I remember getting chased.

MS. STEIN: - Chelsea and the East Village and other -

MS. NEEL: That's right, it shifted.

MS. STEIN: You know, there were all these different locations.

MS. NEEL: We didn't know where to go. Right, we did it - I think it was Chelsea for a
while.

MS. STEIN: We did poster in Chelsea.

MS. NEEL: But I remember getting chased by - for some reason - Leo Castelli; they
were doing an installation so they were open late, and we were postering, and one of
the guys who was working there and came out and was so pissed, because we were
putting a poster right next to him about Leo Castelli - [Stein laughs] - he was in the
report card, that he didn't do too well. And he was - they were chasing us. [Laughs.] We
were, like, laughing and yelling at the same time, with the buckets - [they laugh] - and -
oh, we had to be young.

MS. STEIN: But then, the street became a less effective broadcast medium and one of
the decisions that GuerrillaGirlsBroadBand made was to use the Internet as the street,
and do projects that were Internet-based.
So they are not on the - except for the 2004 poster that they did called, "The
Advantages of Another Bush Presidency," which takes advantage of "The Advantages
of Being a Woman Artist," and was put on the streets of Chelsea, which is more difficult
-

MS. NEEL: Yes.

MS. STEIN: - because the laws had changed in the meanwhile, and we had to hire a
firm that would do it, one of those -

MS. NEEL: - professional firm.

MS. STEIN: And that cost several thousands of dollars.

MS. NEEL: That was funny.

MS. STEIN: But, anyway, we got the poster up right before the election 2004. That was
the only time that we tried to - that the BroadBand, GuerrillaGirlsBroadBand, tried to do
a poster on the streets.

MS. NEEL: Yes. But the idea for posters, we were concerned with, visually, how to
represent the information we stumbled on, that we gathered.

MS. STEIN: And I remember you asked the Guerrilla Girl Number One and Rosie about
the Palladium show ["The Night the Palladium Apologized." 1985]. And so we should
talk a little bit about the Palladium show. [The Palladium was originally located on 14th
Street between 3rd and 4th Avenues, since demolished.]

Were you around for the Palladium show?

MS. NEEL: I was there, yes, but I don't know - yes.

MS. RICHARDS: Nineteen eighties.

MS. STEIN: We were invited to do -

MS. NEEL: Eighty-five.

MS. STEIN: It was real early.

MS. NEEL: Oh, early?

MS. STEIN: It was very early, '86 or '85 or something.

MS. NEEL: Mm-hmm [affirmative], 1985, yes.

MS. STEIN: Anyway, we were invited to prepare an exhibition for the Palladium by Livet
Reichard, and - [Anne] Livet invited us to do this show. And so we invited artists we
admired: Barbara Kruger, Petah Coyne, I forget - Ida Applebroog?

MS. NEEL: Mm-hmm. [Affirmative.]

MS. STEIN: I can't remember.

MS. NEEL: Yes.

MS. STEIN: And we put up this show. And then we realized, oh, this is promoting
individuals who, okay, we admire, but the overall message was diluted.

MS. NEEL: They were - right.

MS. STEIN: It was not the right message.

MS. NEEL: We -

MS. STEIN: We didn't want to convey the message that we like this person -

MS. NEEL: Right.

MS. STEIN: - and we don't like that person. That is really not the point.

MS. NEEL: Right.

MS. STEIN: So we, at that point, made a conscious decision, as a group, not to curate
shows.

MS. NEEL: Never to curate shows -

MS. STEIN: Again.

MS. NEEL: And -

MS. STEIN: And to stick to the informational message.