Translation of the original Italian article published by Artribune on August 2, 2025
By Antonino La Vela
They told her to smile. She painted the truth.
They advised her to stay silent. She answered with posters plastered on city walls in the middle of the night.
They claimed art wasn’t political. She put on a gorilla mask and made it scream.
Who Are the Guerrilla Girls?
Founded in New York in 1984 by seven women artists, the Guerrilla Girls are a feminist, intersectional, and anonymous collective born in response to the exhibition An International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture organized by MoMA, which included only 13 women out of 169 artists.
The group chose to operate anonymously, wearing gorilla masks and adopting the names of women artists from the past. Their weapons: posters, statistical data, books, guerrilla-style night raids, and sharp humor. Their targets: gender and racial discrimination in the art system.
Guerrilla Girls: The Story of Alice Neel
Their language, both visual and textual, merges humor and protest. An artistic militancy that, 40 years later, continues to act inside and outside institutions.
Among their members, one signed her name as Alice Neel. Today we know who she was.
Behind the mask and the pseudonym was Robin Tewes, a New York painter of extraordinary integrity and consistency.
While participating in Guerrilla Girls’ actions, Tewes built a personal artistic trajectory, closely intertwined with the collective’s ideals yet stylistically independent. Her early paintings—realistic, almost photographic domestic interiors—were mental landscapes inhabited by silences and absences. Over time, those rooms began to speak: words written on walls, unspoken thoughts, visual confessions.
With delicate incisiveness, her painting explores the psychology of daily life, especially the female experience, turning the ordinary into a field of emotional and political tension.
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| Credit Robin Tewes |
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| Credit Robin Tewes |
Who Is Robin Tewes?
Her work has been exhibited at institutions such as MoMA, the Whitney Museum, and the Drawing Center, and in international galleries including Leake Street Gallery in London and Headbones Gallery in Canada. She is represented by Adam Baumgold Gallery in New York.
In 2016, she was included in the Smithsonian Institution archives. She has received awards such as the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award and the Gottlieb Foundation Fellowship and has participated in numerous residency programs across North America. In parallel, she has taught at Pace University and worked as a visiting artist at academies in Europe and the United States.
Robin Tewes is not only a historic Guerrilla Girl. She is a painter who has given form to dissent, intimacy, and truth. Her art, like her activism, is a long declaration of existence. Today, finally, we can see her face. And interview her.
Interview with Alice Neel (Robin Tewes)
I didn’t know her. For me, Alice Neel was just a mask: the one chosen by a Guerrilla Girl. Only now, speaking to her, do I understand who is behind that name. You, Robin. The woman who adopted it as a political act, as a tribute, as a statement of belonging.
Why did you choose the name Alice Neel?
We were both exhibiting at the Downtown Whitney Museum in the show Portraits on a Human Scale in 1983. For me, as a young painter, it was an honor to meet her: she was already a beacon.
No one painted like her. In her portraits there was something sharp; she did not idealize or embellish. She revealed.
Especially when painting women: her portraits held strength, vulnerability, real life.
Was it a mask or a banner?
Both. It was armor and alliance. Back then, the art world was a closed club, built by and for men. Women were not just ignored, they were actively erased. Choosing her name was my way of saying: I am here, and I come from a lineage of women who refused to disappear.
How were the Guerrilla Girls born?
Not from theory, but from a wound. In 1984, MoMA organized a show with 169 artists. Only 13 were women. Not a single Black artist. No explanation. No shame. Just institutional indifference.
A small group of us met in secret. No funding, no press. Just fury. But we didn’t want to protest under our own names. Our real names would have been dismissed or ridiculed. So we chose the names of dead women artists.
How central was feminism to your mission?
It was everything. We didn’t call ourselves “feminists” as a trend. We lived it, through our bodies, our blocked careers, our lower paychecks. Feminist art came before us: Judy Chicago, Faith Ringgold, Ana Mendieta. We chose a different path: visual guerrilla warfare. A new kind of sisterhood.
Was humor a tactic or a necessity?
Always a tactic. Nobody listens to sermons. But take power and ridicule it with undeniable data and visual punchlines? It gets under the skin. Humor makes you memorable. Numbers make you undeniable.
How did male artists react?
Often they felt attacked, even those who called themselves “progressive.” But some helped us. They hung our posters in their studios. Without visibility. Without asking for anything in return.
What kind of actions did you do?
We met in our homes, often mine. Then, at night, we would go out pasting posters with flour glue and brushes, especially in Soho, where galleries were concentrated.
There were places from which we were excluded, and others where we chose to remain anonymous.
What has changed over time?
The group has grown. The museums we once criticized have started collecting our posters. New generations have joined, bringing new battles: race, class, gender identity, sexual orientation. But also tensions. Some wanted to show themselves, to come out publicly. I chose silence.
I stopped participating in 2002. But I never stopped observing. Nor creating.
At the end of the interview, I told her:
Meeting you means recognizing a living legacy. Those who turned anger into a tool, art into resistance, anonymity into alliance. We don’t need to know all the names. But we need to know who we should thank.
She was moved.
In the coming weeks, I will publish additional articles exploring the full interview and the powerful dual story of Robin Tewes — both as a committed Guerrilla Girl and as a singular, independent voice in contemporary painting.
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