Rosalba Carriera

Rosalba Carriera is the adopted name of one of the original Guerrial Girls.

Rosalba Giovana Carriera (12 January 1675 – 15 April 1757) was a Venetian Rococo painter. Appealing to Rococo styles for its soft edges and flattering surfaces, she is remembered as one of the most successful women artists of any era.

Clearly, in her time, she was very well known and financially successful.  However, she never made it into any art history books. The Guerrilla Girls adopted the names of dead women artists, such as Rosalba Carriera, as a way of making the world aware of their existence while keeping their own anonymity.

More about the Guerrilla Girls:

In 1985, a bunch of female artists, incensed by an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art that included 165 artists but only 17 women, founded the Guerrilla Girls.  Dubbing ourselves “The Conscience of the Artworld,” we started making posters that bluntly stated the facts of discrimination and used humor to convey information, provoke discussion and to show that feminists can be funny.  We assumed the names of dead women artists, and began wearing gorilla masks when we appeared in public, concealing our true identities and focusing on the issues rather than on our personalities.

In the years that followed, we produced over 90 posters, actions, billboards, postcards, books, and magazine projects, examining discrimination in art, culture and politics. Posters which once appeared on the walls of SoHo in the dead of night now appear on the Internet, in museums and in books.  We have traveled the world over, daring to speak out against injustice wherever it lurks.

Thousands of our supporters own copies of our work, as do institutions such as the New York Public Library, the Library of Congress, the Museum of Modern Art, and The Getty.  We have been the subject of countless articles in newspapers and magazines here and abroad including The New Yorker, Ms. Magazine, Vogue, Esquire, and The New York Times.  We have been featured on PBS, CBS, CNN and many international TV and radio stations.  We have spoken at colleges, universities and art museums all over the world.

We have received awards from the National Organization for Women, the New York City Borough President’s office, the Center for Women’s Policy Studies, New York Woman Magazine and The Ministry of Culture in Berlin.  We were the subject of a documentary film, “Guerrillas in our Midst,” that has won numerous prizes.

In 1993 the National Endowment for the Arts funded our quarterly newsletter, “Hot Flashes.”  In 1995 we published our first book, “Confessions of the Guerrilla Girls.”  “The Guerrilla Girls’ Bedside Companion to the History of Western Art” was published in 1998.

Between 1985 and 2000, close to 100 women, working collectively and anonymously, participated in the group.  At the turn of the millennium, three separate and independent incorporated groups formed to bring fake fur and feminism to new frontiers.

More about Rosalba Carriera:

1675  Born in Venice

1689 Takes painting lessons from Giuseppe Diamantini

1700 Wins reputation as a painter of miniatures and pastels, both among Venetians and tourists

1705 Honorary member of the Accademia di San Luca in Rome

1706 Prince William of the Palatinate invites her to his court in Dusseldorf and for years commissions paintings and pastels from her

1720 Becomes honorary member of the Academie Royalde la Peinture in Paris and the Accademia Clementina in Bologna

1720-21 At the invitation of banker and collector Pierre Crozat, she makes her successful visit to Paris

1739 Elector Frederick Augustus II if Saxony bought her entire output of paintings.  This resulted in Dresden’s Gemaldegalerie Alte Meister now having 150 of her pastels resulting in a Rosalba room.

1751 Becomes blind

1757 Dies