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Members of the Guerrilla Girls, the feminist activist collective, pose in front of the Whitechapel Gallery in London to promote their show, “Is it even worse in Europe”, which runs to 5 March 2017. Photo: Guerrilla Girls 

The group of anonymous feminists are the subject of “Not ready to make nice” at the 49 Nord 6 Est gallery in Metz.

Guerrilla Girls got started in New York City in the 1980s to pressure art galleries and museums to display more works by women and people of colour. They donned gorilla masks and adopted pseudonyms of dead women artists to avoid retribution from within the close-knit art world.

Iconic materials

“Not ready to make nice” is a retrospective of more than 200 works produced by group between 1985 and 2013, including banners, posters, T-shirts and video.

The material in the exhibition is entirely in English.

Some of the Guerrilla Girls material, pictured here at the original Bilbao show, that are part of the “Not ready to make nice” exhibition at the 49 Nord 6 Est gallery in Metz until 17 February 2017. Photo: Guerrilla Girls
Some of the Guerrilla Girls material, pictured here at the original Bilbao show, that are part of the “Not ready to make nice” exhibition at the 49 Nord 6 Est gallery in Metz until 17 February 2017. Photo: Guerrilla Girls

This show is the collective’s first individual exhibition in France, but it was originally curated by Xabier Arakistai for the Alhóndiga Bilbao cultural centre.

“The Guerrilla Girls’ iconic posters are immediately recognizable because they use the language of statistics to reflect women’s position in the field of art and other areas and they highlight the dramatic failure of democratic societies to keep their promise to achieve equality between the sexes,” Arakistai wrote in the exhibition’s press presentation (PDF).

49 Nord 6 Est is run by the Regional Contemporary Art Fund of Lorraine (Frac Lorraine). During a recent visit, a gallery assistant said that one reason Frac Lorraine was able to host “Not ready to make nice” is because it fares relatively well in gender equality.

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Some of the Guerrilla Girls material, pictured here at the original Bilbao show, that are part of the “Not ready to make nice” exhibition at the 49 Nord 6 Est gallery in Metz until 17 February 2017. Photo: Guerrilla Girls

Indeed, “the Frac Lorraine collection is 35% women artists, ‘Zubeida Agha’ and ‘Frida Kahlo’ of Guerrilla Girls told Delano via email this week. “They had 4 solo exhibitions by women artists over past 5 years.”

They know this because the activist group sent diversity questionnaires to 383 museums and art spaces across Europe. (The results are the subject of the current show in London, “Is it even worse in Europe?”, which runs through March 2017.)

22% women

“Of all the collecting museums that responded to our survey, the average percentage of women in a museum collection is 22%,” stated the activists.

One institution in the Grand Duchy also participated, the Casino contemporary art forum. “Casino Luxembourg does not have a collection. They had 10 solo exhibitions by women artists over past 5 years,” Agha and Kahlo wrote on Tuesday.

But a total of only 101 galleries and museums participated in the study; 282 did not. Delano asked the Guerrilla Girls members if they suspected that the 101 organisations were not 100% reflective of the wider art world, since it was a self-selecting sample.

They answered: “Yes! We are very curious as to what’s happening at the institutions that didn’t answer! What were they afraid of?”

“Not ready to make nice” runs until 19 February

Open Tuesday to Friday, 2pm-7pm (including school holidays); Saturday & Sunday 11am-7pm. Free admission. Free group visits in English can be booked in advance

49 Nord 6 Est – Frac Lorraine

1 bis rue des Trinitaires
F-57000 Metz
France