Entering the Picture

In 1970, Judy Chicago and fifteen students founded the groundbreaking Feminist Art Program (FAP) at Fresno State. Drawing upon the consciousness-raising techniques of the women's liberation movement, they created shocking new art forms depicting female experiences. Collaborative work and performance art - including the famous "Cunt Cheerleaders" - were program hallmarks. Moving to Los Angeles, the FAP produced the first major feminist art installation, Womanhouse (1972). Augmented by thirty-seven illustrations and color plates, this interdisciplinary collection of essays by artists and scholars, many of whom were eye witnesses to landmark events, relates how feminists produced vibrant bodies of art in Fresno and other locales where similar collaborations flourished. Articles on topics such as African American artists in New York and Los Angeles, San Francisco's Las Mujeres Muralistas and Asian American Women Artists Association, and exhibitions in Taiwan and Italy showcase the artistic trajectories that destabilized traditional theories and practices and reshaped the art world. An engaging editor's introduction explains how feminist art emerged within the powerful women's movement that transformed America. Entering the Picture is an exciting collection about the provocative contributions of feminists to American art.

Jill Fields is Professor of History at California State University, Fresno. She is the author of An Intimate Affair: Women, Lingerie, and Sexuality.

Jill Fields, Introduction, Section I: Emerging--Views from the Periphery 1. Gail Levin, Feminist Class, edited by Melissa Morris 2. Laura Meyer and Faith Wilding, Collaboration and Conflict in the Fresno Feminist Art Program: An Experiment in Feminist Pedagogy 3. Nancy Youdelman and Karen LeCocq, Reflections on the First Feminist Art Program 4. Moira Roth, Interview with Suzanne Lacy, edited by Laura Meyer 5. Paula Harper, The First Feminist Art Program: A View from the 1980s 6. Judy Chicago, Feminist Art Education: Made in California Section II: Re-Centering--Theory and Practice 7. Valerie Smith, Abundant Evidence: Black Women Artists of the 1960s and 1970s 8. Jennie Klein, 'Teaching to Transgress:' Rita Yokoi and the Fresno Feminist Art Program 9. Lillian Faderman, Joyce Aiken: Thirty Years of Feminist Art and Pedagogy in Fresno 10. Phranc, "Your Vagina Smells Fine Now Naturally" 11. Terezita Romo, Collective History: Las Mujeres Muralistas 12. Joanna Gardner-Huggett, The Woman's Art Cooperative Space as a Site for Social Change: Artemisia Gallery, Chicago (1973-1979) 13. Gloria Orenstein, Salon Women of the Second Wave: Honoring the Great Matrilineage of Creators of Culture 14. Katie Cercone, The New York Feminist Art Institute, 1979-1990 15. Nancy Azara and Darla Bjork, Our Journey to the New York Feminist Art Institute Section III: Picturing-- Transformation 16. Sylvia Savala, How I Became a Chicana Feminist Artist 17. Lydia Nakashima Degarrod, Searching for Catalyst and Empowerment: The Asian American Women Artists Association, 1989-Present 18. Miriam Schaer, Notes of a Dubious Daughter: My Unfinished Journey Towards Feminism 19. Tressa Berman and Nancy Mithlo, 'The Way Things Are:' Curating Place as Feminist Practice in American Indian Women's Art" 20. Ying-Ying Chien, Marginal Discourse and Pacific Rim Women's Art 21. Jo Anna Isaak, Gaia Cianfanelli and Caterina Iaquinta, Curatorial Practice as Collaboration in the U.S. and Italy 22. Beverly Naidus, Feminist Activist Art Pedagogy