Guerrilla Girls On Tour!: Create a poster instead of typing a hashtag - What I learned this Women's History Month.

Saturday, March 12, 2016

Create a poster instead of typing a hashtag - What I learned this Women's History Month.

Dear Diary,

Happy Women’s History Month! March 9, 2016 kicked off the official tour of my new talk: Act Like a Feminist Artist: what no one told you about starting a grassroots organization. The talk highlights passages from UN/MASKED my forthcoming memoir due out this October from Skyhorse. Monmouth University was the host of this inaugural event and the theatre was packed with students from various gender studies, art and humanities classes.

Introduced by Dean Mezey, I entered Pollack Theatre in the traditional Guerrilla Girls On Tour fashion – by throwing bananas. Since it was 1PM and lunch time, everyone was hungry. Going through my herstory as a Guerrilla Girl and Guerrilla Girl On Tour, I displayed slides of the Guerrilla Girls’ foray into the theatre world and shared inside stories of our sticker campaigns, for example that time at the TKTS booth in Times Square where everyone thought we were members of The Lion King.

The students of MU did not disappoint in the Q and A. we talked about the Oscar snub, objectification of women in art, theatre in New Jersey and the important role of gender studies programs. The most interesting part of my time at Monmouth U was a discussion about just how hands off activism is these days – everyone wants to create the next hash tag that will blow up the internet but no one puts pen to paper anymore to make a sticker or a poster. Well, Guerrilla Girls On Tour has not given up on using markers and newsprint to think up our ideas. Try it and see how the physical act of creating something three dimensional will stimulate your activism.

My favorite part of the day was signing posters after the talk where I met the awesome feminist, Lennon. (Yes, if she had been born male her parents would have called her McCartney.) Thanks for being there, Lennon, and for introducing yourself.