​Guerrilla Tactics

By Jacinta Macheel Zens

The Guerrilla Girls are a New York-based anonymous, feminist art group whose main focus is illuminating gender and racial inequalities in the art world. To ensure their anonymity, the women wear plastic gorilla masks during events to hide their identities. With over 30 years as an art group, the Guerrilla Girls have received international acclaim for their works of protest art.

Since this January, they have been involved in the largest collaboration with a community to date: a mega-collaboration with arts organizations in both Minneapolis and St. Paul titled “The Twin Cities Takeover.” The pinnacle of The Twin Cities Takeover is a week packed with 26 Guerrilla Girls events located around Minneapolis and St. Paul. This week, called Takeover Week, begins February 29 with multiple events in multiple locations and ends on March 5 with a Guerrilla Girl lecture at the State Theatre.

This historic collaboration between the Guerrilla Girls and art organizations in Minneapolis and St. Paul has a connection to the arts community in Fargo-Moorhead. The entire project would not have been possible without the vision and drive of former Plains Art Museum’s Director of Curatorial Affairs and Interpretation, Megan Johnston.

I was able to interview both the Guerrilla Girls and Megan Johnston about “The Twin Cities Takeover.” I will start with the Guerrilla Girls portion of the interview, and end with the interview of Ms. Johnston.

HPR: My first question is pretty generic, but is worth repeating as many people in the Fargo-Moorhead area are not aware of who you are or what you do. So, my first question is: who are you and what do you do? The next question is also pretty generic, and I have heard you answer it in interviews, but it is a critically important question, so I will ask it: why do you do your projects?

Guerrilla Girls combined answer: We decided it was time to quit our day jobs as brain surgeons and do some good in the world. No, wait — we were artists who saw that most of the opportunities in the art world went to white men, and we realized nobody was going to change their discriminating ways without some pressure.

We came up with a new idea about how to do political art: to twist an issue around and present it in a way that hadn’t been seen before, using facts and humor in a surprising, transgressive manner to prove our case.

We started putting up posters around New York and and all hell broke loose. People started talking about the issues. We shamed museums and galleries into doing better. We’ve now done over a hundred posters, stickers, billboards, actions, books, etc. about art, film, pop culture, human rights of all kinds, politics, and feminism.

HPR: My next questions are about the Twin Cities Takeover. How did the Twin Cities Takeover start for you? How long was the planning process for the event?

GG: Megan Johnston, who we worked with a couple years ago in Belfast, Ireland, moved back to Minnesota and had this idea to work with us again. She got a whole bunch of artists, curators and arts administrators together to organize an entire series of events all over the Twin Cities.

We did a billboard a couple of years ago with Joan Vorderbruggen who is now with the Hennepin Trust, and she came into the project, too. The Takeover is a milestone for us. It’s the first time artists, students, and almost every institution in the Cities have joined together to do exhibitions.

We can’t wait to see the projects everyone is working on. And we are very excited about our own projects at the Walker and MIA starting next week and on the streets of Minneapolis a few weeks later. We all have been working on the project for almost two years.

HPR: With the event being so large-scale, was it as difficult to create that many things at a time? Did you build one project off of another, look at every institution as a separate project, or look at the whole thing as one project?

GG: No, because our fantastic organizers did so much to set it all up and sequence the projects over three visits to the Twin Cities in the last six months. Each institution was different: The Walker wanted to show a selection of our work that they own and we designed an installation for it; the MIA asked us to do an intervention in their galleries and we looked at their collection and made an animation about its “Mysteries.”

The Hennepin Trust found a lot of public spaces for us to do billboards, banners, projections and posters all over Downtown Minneapolis. Some of them will go up the day of the Academy Awards and will comment on the history of the Oscars, and there are lots of other shows and events by Minnesota artists.

HPR: You are halfway through the Twins City Takeover; what has been your favorite event so far and are you particularly excited about any event that is coming up?

GG: Actually we are two-thirds through the Takeover and our favorite part is always the event we are about to do. In the fall it was our gigs at MCAD and St. Catherine; in January it was our Walker install and MIA intervention. We can’t wait to see all the other work around town -- including our own!

HPR: Megan Johnston, how are you involved with the current Guerrilla Girls project, the Twin Cities Takeover?

Megan Johnston: I was an original instigator of the project in 2013 (see my article in Art21). I had just started teaching at Minneapolis College of Art & Design and they asked me to organize a project with the Guerrilla Girls. I had already worked with the Girls in Ireland and they wanted to see if we could do something with the Guerrilla Girls with MCAD students. I was hesitant at first, as curators rarely want to do the same project again and again, but I said I would do it if it could be something different. The premise would be similar—collaborative, non-hierarchical and multi-institutional based, but the partners’ depth and breadth would be much deeper, bigger and far-reaching.

HPR: How did you first get involved with the Guerrilla Girls?

MJ: I take chances—sometimes very ostentatious chances. I contacted the Guerrilla Girls and asked them if they were interested in coming to Ireland to do a new work commission piece with an intentionally all-Ireland context. They said yes. I mean, sometimes it’s just a matter of having the confidence and asking.

HPR: Many people in the Fargo art scene fondly remember you from your time at the Plains Art Museum. Can you briefly catch us up on where you have been, and where you are now?

MJ: I was in Minneapolis for one year teaching at MCAD and finalizing my PhD dissertation; then I was recruited to run The Model in Sligo, on the west coast of Ireland. Now I’m back as Executive Director at the Rochester Art Center in Rochester, Minnesota. RAC hosted the Guerrilla Girls when they were here in January and we had our largest opening ever. Rochester loved them.

HPR: Do you have any comments for the members of the FM arts community?

MJ: I really loved my time in Fargo, and I hold the people--especially the artists, very close to my heart. I still connect with many friends regularly. I would also like to add that the arts, wherever you choose to create or whatever medium you use, are very powerful in the Fargo and Moorhead area and region. Artists can -- and should -- take the lead in the institutions (public and private).

The force of the artistic community in Fargo-Moorhead is palpable and needs to be tapped and leveraged to lead significant and sustainable creative placemaking. Businesses need a creative class, artistic energy, and the innovation produced by artists. We can lead the way. It’s all about ostentatious leadership.

YOU SHOULD KNOW:

http://www.ggtakeover.com/

For more information about Megan Johnston’s article

http://blog.art21.org/2016/01/28/