On March 16, 1990, the radical feminist art collective SisterSerpents opened Rattle Your Rage: Women's Views of Their Oppressors in Chicago. The exhibition brought together work by 32 artists from around the United States and was framed as direct visual opposition to misogyny, patriarchal art-world habits, anti-abortion politics, and violence against women. Its opening program paired the exhibition with a screening of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Bremer Freiheit and a panel on failures of law enforcement to protect abused women. SisterSerpents worked anonymously through posters, stickers, zines, and exhibitions, with publicly named founding members including Jeramy Turner and Mary Ellen Croteau. The show helped define the group's agitational, street-oriented feminist art practice.
The exhibition anchored SisterSerpents' reputation as a confrontational feminist art collective of the early 1990s.