In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

21 CHAPTER ONE Making Feminist Artists The Feminist Art Programs of Fresno and CalArts, 1970–1972 in 1970, artist judy chicago took a position at Fresno State College (fsc, now the California State University, Fresno). She arrived on the innovative campus for the spring semester, not sure of what to expect.1 Professionally, she brought with her a reputation as an up-andcoming artist with a recognizable name, a quality that enabled her to push the fsc Art Department in new directions. Personally, she arrived with the feeling that she needed a way to reconnect to original content for her art.2 Worn down by the pursuit of recognition in the modern art scene for over ten years, Chicago wanted to move toward a “female-centered” art. Part of this involved, in her words, “moving away from the male-dominated art scene and being in an all-female environment where we could study our history separate from men’s and see ourselves in terms of our own needs and desires, not in terms of male stereotypes of women.”3 Relatively soon upon her arrival, Chicago launched the nation’s first feminist art program and began to practice feminism in often uncomfortable but always exciting new ways. Fresno, a college town in the center of the San Joaquin Valley far from the more vibrant urban art centers of Los Angeles and San Francisco, was not such a far-fetched answer to the artist’s question of where to reinvent herself. The college had reinvented itself in the wake of the civil rights, antiwar , and student protest movements of the 1960s.4 In 1966 fsc opened the Experimental College in direct response to faculty and student calls for a more relevant and engaged curriculum. Fresno launched a range of programs that offered classes in the new fields of Chicano, black, ethnic, and women’s studies.5 With such a forward-thinking faculty and an administration begrudgingly responsive to the changing cultural climate, Chicago 22 chapter one hoped she had placed herself in an environment with enough support to allow her to experiment and enough farmland between herself and la to allow her to grow in new directions in relative obscurity.6 “I felt that I had built my identity and my art-making as a person—as an artist—on the framework of reality that I had been brought up in, and now that framework had changed, so I wanted some time out, to look around and find out what was appropriate now,” she told an interviewer in 1971.7 Progressive politics and sexism remained tightly in step, in Fresno and elsewhere. In her first semester, Chicago taught a coed class where she found her male students gave her “a lot of resistance” and in short order had “taken over.”8 Dismayed at the passivity of the female students and the unfounded confidence of the male students, Chicago announced during class one day that the “men aren’t to talk at all.” An excruciating twenty minutes passed until a courageous female student raised her hand.9 At that moment Chicago determined that she would address the unique problems facing women artists, or women who wanted to be artists. Some of Chicago’s male students booed her, finding her style abrasive and her politics absurd. Attrition rates in her classes were high. Yet, while some students dropped out, others pledged undying support, finding Chicago inspiring. No matter what students felt about their professor, a buzz surrounded her, only amplified when one of the nation’s foremost art journals, Artforum , ran a full-page ad, placed by the Jack Glenn Gallery, for her show at the small and relatively new California State College at Fullerton, Orange County, in la in 1971. The ad featured a headshot of Chicago wearing a headband and dark glasses and announced, “Judy Gerowitz hereby divests herself of all names imposed upon her through male social dominance and freely chooses her own name: Judy Chicago.”10 A second full-page ad, in the Artforum December issue, showed Chicago in a boxing ring, an image that evoked the machismo that characterized the art world and against which the artist railed.11 The set of images, and Chicago’s linkage of art and feminist politics, secured her place as one of the leading figures of the emergent feminist art movement.12 The catalog for the Fullerton show, written by gallery director Dextra Frankel, confirmed her buzz-worthiness, and the LA Times critic...

Share