Overview:
The Fresno Art Museum welcomes the public to Wendy Maruyama: A Sculptural Survey, craft, material, and process 1972-2024, along with two other exhibitions opening on July 27.
Wendy Maruyama doesn’t necessarily think of herself as a “feminist artist,” but this weekend she’ll be the face of a long tradition of celebrating artistic women in Fresno, a community with deep ties to the feminist art movement.
The Fresno Art Museum welcomes the public to Wendy Maruyama: A Sculptural Survey, craft, material, and process 1972-2024, along with two other exhibitions opening on July 27.
Maruyama, retired professor from San Diego State University and the California College of Arts and Crafts, becomes the 35th recipient of the museum’s Distinguished Woman Artist, an honor the museum has passed out since the late 1980s. The exhibit features Maruyama’s work from throughout her six-decade career, displayed in chronological order.
One of the first two women to graduate from Rochester Institute of Technology with a master’s degree in furniture making, Maruyama’s primary medium is furniture making.
Michele Ellis Pracy, executive director and chief curator of the Fresno Art Museum, describes Maruyama’s work as “a sculptural survey in wood.”
The Distinguished Woman Artist award honors female artists over the age of 60 with a national and/or international reputation. The artist must live at least 100 miles outside of Fresno – a stipulation meant to guard the honor from being awarded due solely to connections or nepotism.
The distinguished artist is picked by the Council of 100, an “auxiliary group to the museum’s membership,” according to Pracy. The council takes its name from the number of its original members. According to the Fresno Art Museum website, Barrett needed to raise $25,000 in order to bring a year of women artist programming to the Fresno Art Museum. He then found a group of 100 women to donate $250, forming the original Council of 100.
Today, there are around 120 to 125 members of the Council of 100, and seven to nine artists are brought forward to choose from annually, Pracy said.
A six-decade career
Maruyama said she was surprised and grateful for the Fresno award, which she said “came out of the blue.”
“My first thought was ‘Oh no!’ because so much work goes into this,” she said. “The last five years have been kind of rough, because I lost my dad, my aunt, a couple of really good friends, and my dog… my work wasn’t what it should have been, and on top of that I have a show coming up in New York City in November, so I didn’t think I could possibly make enough work for the Fresno show.”
Pracy, who has curated exhibits for the past 10 Distinguished Women Artists at FAM, wasn’t daunted. “I became immersed in it as soon as I could,” Pracy said. “I’m doing this as a gift to the artist, and as a gift to the lives of anyone who comes to see the exhibition.”
Rather than displaying only new works, the exhibition will feature Maruyama’s work in chronological order divided by decade, as well as photos of Maruyama herself through the years.
“[Maruyama] has the four premier gallery spaces for this exhibition,” Pracy said. “As you progress through the exhibition, you see how her work finnesses over time – in workmanship, complexity, purpose– you’re also seeing her, watching her age, become more comfortable in who she is.”
The feminist art movement born in Fresno
The Distinguished Woman Artist recognition began in 1989 with Robert Barrett’s push to get a year of programming created solely by female artists in the Fresno Art Museum. “Many museums focused primarily on men, they would give solo exhibitions to men, they gave men credit for creating art movements and cementing such things for America,” Pracy said.
Fresno Art Museum carries on the legacy of supporting women artists and their creations– but the museum’s Council of 100 and Distinguished Woman Artist recognition have their roots in Fresno State’s Feminist Art program.
In 1970, internationally renowned artist, writer, and lecturer Judy Chicago taught at Fresno State (then known as Fresno State College), creating the first feminist art class in the nation, which then expanded into the feminist art program in its second semester.
“I think what Judy Chicago did was break the glass ceiling,” Pracy said.
Recently retired Fresno State art history professor Laura Meyer, who wrote A Studio of Their Own: the Legacy of the Fresno Feminist Experiment, agreed.
“Judy Chicago felt that within the art world and within society, there wasn’t a framework for understanding approaches other than what was deemed great art by mostly cisgender white men who thought that certain subject matters or approaches were the most valid,” Meyer said.
Nancy Youdelman, a visual artist and sculptor based in Clovis who was part of the original feminist art cohort, recounted how the class of young women artists banded together to rent a studio on Kings Canyon road. “[Chicago] taught us how to build a wall,” said Youdelman, speaking about how Chicago had her students remodel the building, which was abandoned when they began renting it.
“She wanted them to learn these skills that were considered male skills because she didn’t want them to be limited,” Meyer said.
Once the building was fit to serve as a studio, it became an artistic home to the feminist art class, which accepted no men until the mid 1980s.
Karen LeCocq, an internationally renowned artist and educator who also participated in the Fresno Art program, described one of her art works: “It was the first studio I ever participated in… I built an environment that was 10 feet by 8 feet, a foam door that was slit down the middle, and then you were standing on a four-inch thick platform with low lighting… Basically, it was a cunt. It was a cunt people could enter.”
After one year in Fresno, Judy Chicago was invited by CalArts to continue the program there with fellow artist Miriam Shapiro. Many of the artists from the 1970-71 year of the program then left Fresno State to follow Chicago to CalArts, including Youdelman and LeCocq.
While the CalArts Feminist Art Program went on to gain national recognition for Chicago’s project Womanhouse, which was covered by Time Magazine, the Fresno program was taken over by local artist Joyce Aiken. Aiken retired from the program in 1992, at which point Fresno State dropped the class.
Despite this, Fresno’s participation in feminist art did not stop with the program’s end — Aiken decided to establish independent Gallery 25 in 1974.
“It’s called Gallery 25 because initially there were 25 women,” said Michele Sani, a retired educator and artist who has been a member of Gallery 25 since 1994. The goal of Gallery 25, according to the gallery’s website, was to give “the women in the [feminist art] program the chance to exhibit their work to the public and gain professional experience as artists”.
Gallery 25 has adapted over the decades though — including opening up to men in the 1980s, and transitioning to a fully virtual gallery due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“[The Gallery 25] members wanted more members,” said Sani when asked about the decision to allow men to display their art in the gallery. “As some members matriculated or moved on for whatever reason, some members felt like we needed to deepen the pool. Most of the members active at that time were newer members.”
“The intention was good,” Sani said. “But the few founding members who were still there in ‘89 felt like it threw out their whole concept, so they peeled off.
Fruits of her labor
Though the Distinguished Woman Artist award was inspired by Judy Chicago’s work, it is not necessarily an award for only artists who identify as feminist. Pracy expressed that as a curator, she does her best to express whatever the artist she’s curating feels or wants — not any specific view or ideology.
For Maruyama, whose website says her “early work combined ideologies of feminism and traditional craft objects,” feminism was never the goal of her work.
Maruyama said, “I didn’t really think twice about the fact that I happened to be a woman and loved woodwork, I didn’t think about the fact that happened to be a limitation. But other people made that a thing — ‘What’s a woman doing in furniture?’”
LeCocq, similarly, did not enter the feminist art program in the 70s believing herself to be an incredibly strong feminist. “I felt very weak in [feminism and politics], but I felt very strong as an artist,” LeCocq said. “I tried to make real masculine looking art, but I realized a lot of my art does come out of my experience of being a woman.”
Despite the fact that Judy Chicago and many artists within the original feminist art program have gained traction, LeCocq expressed disappointment that it took this long to achieve that– and gratitude that it’s happening now.
“I think it’s kind of sad that women artists in general get recognized in the 70s and 80s and beyond, while the men we went to CalArts with got recognized in their 20s and 30s,” LeCocq said.
Regardless of where they are now, though, the experience of the feminist art program and cause bonded many participants for life. LeCocq expressed that she still remains in contact with many of the feminist art cohort from Fresno State in 1970 – even if they aren’t as physically close as they once were.
The unity and network created here in Fresno – whether by the Feminist Art Program of decades past or the Distinguished Woman Artist distinction now– is a hallmark of Fresno. According to Pracy, Fresno Art Museum has long been known for setting a progressive standard among both northern and southern California art museums.
“I am a museum lover,” Pracy said. “I believe we cannot be a fulfilled, peaceful, gentle society without museum experiences– and I want to provide that for people here in Fresno.”
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