CHAMPAIGN, ILL.- Not Ready to Make Nice: Guerrilla Girls in the Artworld and Beyond is one of four new exhibitions opening Jan. 23 at the University of Illinois' Krannert Art Museum. Featuring major works from international projects by the anonymous feminist collective that has been urging museums toward equality for almost 30 years, the expansive, multimedia Not Ready exhibition includes iconic pieces from the group's 1980s and 90s activism as well as behind-the-scenes photos, love letters and hate mail.

Since 1985, Guerrilla Girls have been combining humor, hard facts and art on street posters, billboards and stickers to draw attention to the underrepresentation of female and minority artists in museums around the world. Their most iconic poster, a collaged image of a nude concubine (Ingres La Grande Odalisque) adorned with a gorilla mask, posed the question: Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum? The statistical answers have been updated by the Guerrilla Girls over the years, with results ranging from females accounting for less than 5 percent of artists in the Metropolitan's Modern Art section but 85 percent of the nudes in 1989, to less than 4 percent of the artists and 76 percent of the nudes in 2011. They've published five books, most recently "The Guerrilla Girls' Art Museum Activity Book," with fun facts about art museums (such as, gift shop executives have higher salaries than curators), hosted workshops, mounted billboards, and distributed stickers and posters designed for other activists to plaster on bathroom stall doors and in gift shops. All along, the Guerrilla Girls have maintained their anonymity by adopting the names of dead female artists and wearing gorilla masks. One of the founding members of the group will join curator Neysa Page-Lieberman for a conversational lecture at the Krannert Art Museum auditorium at 7 p.m. on Feb. 27.

To complement the Guerrilla Girls exhibition, the museum has selected works from its permanent collection created by artists who used similar tactics to confront inequities based on race, gender, and sexual orientation; to protest military conflict; or to criticize class disparities. Titled Art as Provocation, this exhibition includes works by Michael Ray Charles, Vernon Fisher, Barbara Kruger, Lorna Simpson and Carrie Mae Weems.

Another exhibition which opened Jan. 23 at the museum features Victor Ekpuk, whose work is included in the permanent collections of the World Bank and the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of African Art. Ekpuk is known for his improvisational use of nsibidi pictographs that have served as a means of written communication for centuries in West Africa and his native Nigeria. His early fascination with this encoded writing has evolved from a pedagogical environment to drawings and paintings. This exhibition, Auto-Graphics, displays some of his newest work, incorporating collage, digital prints and large-scale drawings, including one that he will draw directly onto the Krannert Art Museum wall. Ekpuk will return to Krannert Art Museum for a Gallery Conversation with art history professor Prita Meier and exhibition curator Allyson Purpura at 5:30 p.m. on March 13.

"Mandala Flea Market Mutants presents the work of Yoko Inoue, a Japanese-born artist who explores the transcultural assimilation of popular objects ranging from water bottles to Hello Kitty to Buddha figurines by hand casting hybrid objects. Her installation transforms the gallery space into street vendor booths stocked with "mutant" ceramic sculptures. Inoue has been awarded numerous honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and residencies in Brazil, France, Italy, and the Netherlands."

Not Ready to Make Nice, which was organized by Columbia College Chicago, runs through April 26. Art as Provocation, curated by Kathryn Koca Polite, runs through May 4. Auto-Graphics, curated by Allyson Purpura, and Mandala Flea Market Mutants, curated by Tumelo Mosaka, run through July 27.

Not Ready to Make Nice is sponsored in part by John E. Moyer Sr. and Chris Moyer Endowment Fund and Krannert Art Museum and is partially supported by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council Agency. Auto-Graphics is partially supported by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council Agency and Mandala Flea Market Mutants is sponsored in part by Fred and Donna Giertz and Krannert Art Museum Endowment Fund.

Krannert Art Museum and Kinkead Pavilion is a unit of the College of Fine and Applied Arts at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The museum is located at the corner of Sixth Street and Peabody Drive in Champaign, one block east of Memorial Stadium. The museum is open to the public from 9 am to 5 pm Tuesday through Saturday, 9 am to 9 pm Thursday, and 2 to 5 pm Sunday. Museum closes on Thursdays at 5 pm during the summer months and on University holidays. Admission is free; suggested donation $3.