Public Art Fund, Guerrilla Girls, Billboard Project card, 1991

Sold

In 1991, the Public Art Fund sponsored the Guerrilla Girls’ exhibition of 10 outdoor billboards in four New York boroughs. Each billboard bore an image of the Mona Lisa with a fig leaf covering her mouth, and the message, “First they want to take away a woman’s right to choose. Now they’re censoring art.” The slogan seems to allude to recent controversies involving the National Endowment for the Arts, and chair John Frohnmayer’s decision to veto funding for the performance artists Karen Finley, John Fleck, Holly Hughes, and Tim Miller (later known as the “NEA Four”).

Front
Front
Reverse
Reverse

DOWNTOWN ERA EXHIBITION HOMEPAGE

Graffiti and Street Art Guerrilla Girls New York City Political and Public Art Public Art Fund

Collections

40 Top Art Events of the Downtown Era: A Timeline, 1974–1992
Collections
The Downtown Era began in the 1970s, when aspiring artists of the baby-boomer generation arrived in New York. Over the next two decades, they would radically change the art world, opening it up to new forms of media, new modes of exhibiting art, and new social perspectives.