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NOT READY TO MAKE NICE: Guerrilla Girls in the Artworld and Beyond

 

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EXHIBITION: September 13 – October 22, 2016

EVENTS
Tour & Refreshments: Wednesday, September 14, 3 pm

Art Crawl: Thursday, September 29, 3-5 pm
Tour begins at the Simons Center Gallery, followed by the Zuccaire Gallery at 3:30pm

Reception: Saturday, October 1, 7-9 pm

Artist Talk: Thursday, October 13, 4 pm
Talk will be held at the Wang Center Theatre, preceded by Curator's Tour at the Zuccaire Gallery, 3PM


Part of the Provost's Lecture Series, the Guerrilla Girls Artist Talk is co-hosted by the Humanities Institute of Stony Brook with additional support from the College of Arts and Sciences, Departments of Art and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Seating is limited.

Click here to watch the full Artist Talk.

Not Ready to Make Nice, a major presentation of the Guerrilla Girls, illuminates and contextualizes the important historical and ongoing work of these highly original, provocative and influential artists who champion feminism and social change. The Guerrilla Girls have been powerfully and consistently active since first breaking onto the art scene in 1985. Appearing only in gorilla masks and assuming the names of dead women artists, the activist group has remained anonymous for nearly three decades while revealing shocking truths about sexism and prejudice in the artworld and beyond.

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Beginning with their courageous poster campaigns of the 1980s and continuing with large-scale international projects, they brilliantly take on the art establishment in a way that has never been seen before or since. Using "facts, humor and fake fur," they have exposed the discriminatory collecting and exhibiting practices of the most feared art dealers, curators, and collectors. Expanding their work to include non-visual arts media in the 1990s, they've taken on everything from the discrimination of women film directors to the environmental crisis.

 
 
 
ggThe Guerrilla Girls. Photo by Traven Rice.
 

Focusing primarily on recent work from the past decade, the exhibition features rarely shown international projects that trace the collective’s artistic and activist influence around the globe. In addition, a selection of iconic work from the 80s and 90s illustrates the formative development of the group’s philosophy and conceptual approach to arts activism. Documentary material including ephemera, behind-the-scenes photos and secret anecdotes reveal the Guerrilla Girls’ process and the events that drive their incisive institutional interventions.

 
 
 
 
 
 

Visitors can peruse the artists' favorite "love letters and hate mail," and are invited to contribute their own voices to interactive installations. This multimedia, expansive exhibition illustrates that the work of the anonymous, feminist-activist Guerrilla Girls is as vital and revolutionary as ever. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalog available for purchase.

 
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Not Ready to Make Nice: Guerrilla Girls in the Artworld and Beyond and the 2016-2017 Paul W. Zuccaire Gallery schedule is made possible by a generous grant from the Paul W. Zuccaire Foundation. Additional funding is provided by the Cowles Charitable Trust and the Friends of Staller Center.

Not Ready to Make Nice: Guerrilla Girls in the Artworld and Beyond is curated by Neysa Page-Lieberman, Executive Director and Curator of the Department of Exhibitions and Performance Spaces at Columbia College Chicago, and organized and circulated by Columbia College Chicago. The Stony Brook presentation is organized by Karen Levitov, Director and Curator, Paul W. Zuccaire Gallery, Staller Center for the Arts, Stony Brook University.