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Former names | Fresno Arts Center (until 1985) Fresno Arts Center and Museum (until 1988) |
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| Established | 1948 |
| Location | 2233 N First St, Fresno, California, United States |
| Type | Art museum |
| Accreditation | American Association of Museums |
| Architects | David Horn |
| Website | www |
The Fresno Art Museum is an art museum in Fresno, California. The museum's collection includes contemporary art, modern art, Mexican and Mexican-American art, and Pre-Columbian sculpture. [1]
"The Fresno Art Museum offers a dynamic experience for appreciating art. The Museum welcomes, inspires, and educates a diverse regional audience through significant exhibitions, thought-provoking programs, and meaningful interactions with artists and the creative process." [2]
The museum traces its history back to the Fresno Art League, a group of local artists that was founded in 1948 and that gathered sufficient community support to incorporate as the Fresno Art Center in 1949. [3] The group established a permanent space to occupy in 1956. With help from Fresno Mayor Gordon Dunn, a historic three-story dwelling called the W. R. Price home was moved to city owned property called "Radio Park" north of downtown Fresno. [4] The city agreed to lease the land for $1 per year and maintains the building exterior and the grounds. [5]
The American Association of Museums granted the Art Center accreditation in 1973. The Museum has continued to maintain its accreditation, most recently being reaccredited in 2016. [2]
In 1985 the Board of Trustees changed the Center's name to Fresno Arts Center and Museum, and then again in 1988 to the Fresno Art Museum. [2] Robert Barrett, the museum's director and curator from 1980 to 1994, was the driving force behind the museum's expansion, collection growth, establishment of an endowment fund, growth in adult education through a partnership with Fresno City College, and even attempted to raise the museum and tourism in an initiative called "Arts to Zoo". [1] [6]
The museum held a successful $2 million funding drive to add a 14,000 square feet (1,300 m2) outdoor gallery of sculptures. Construction began in June 2000. [7]
The Fresno Art Museum's permanent collection preserves and protects over 3,600 works. The main focus of the permanent collection and exhibitions is on modern and contemporary artworks (painting, sculpture, prints, photographs, and other media) from the 20th and 21st centuries, Mesoamerican artifacts from Mexico and the Andes, and modern and folk art of Mexican origin. The Permanent Collection includes works by Ansel Adams, Ruth Asawa, Salvador Dalí, Diego Rivera, Robert Cremean, [8] Maynard Dixon, August Madrigal, Clement Renzi, Norman Rockwell, Varaz Samuelian, Andy Warhol, among others. [2]
The Fresno Art Museum became renowned for its exhibitions of Feminist Art going from an unknown "art center" to nationally known with an exhibit of the artist Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party . [9] Judy Chicago brought Fresno's attention to women artists when she taught the first feminist art class in the country at California State University, Fresno. [10]
The Council of 100 presents the Distinguished Woman Artist Award annually to a woman artist who has spent thirty or more years in the studio and has created a unique and prestigious body of work. The Fresno Art Museum was the first museum in the United States to devote a full year of their exhibition schedule 1986/87, exclusively for women artists.
In order to finance the cost of this year of exhibitions, it was necessary to match a grant for $25,000. Robert Barrett, the executive director of the museum, suggested the means to raise the funds; to enlist 100 women from the community, each of whom would donate $250 to the museum for this project. Weekly meetings were scheduled to inform the invited women about the project and their involvement with it. The group would be called the Council of 100. Over one hundred women participated and many of those women continue to support this program today. [11]
Since the spring of 1988, the Fresno Art Museum's Council of 100 has honored the following internationally recognized artists with the annual Distinguished Woman Artist Award and Exhibition:
The caliber of these honorees has elevated the status of the Council of 100's Distinguished Woman Artist Award and has brought the Fresno Art Museum national recognition from many organizations including the National Women's Museum in Washington, D.C. [11]
In September 2012, the Fresno Unified School District became the tenth national test site for the John F. Kennedy Center's Any Given Child initiative. The purpose of the initiative is to provide a high quality arts education for students K-12 across an entire school district, city government, and local arts community, aided by the Kennedy Center. The Fresno County Office of Education is the governing organization of all schools in Fresno County and facilitates the implementation of this program through its Visual and Performing Arts department. [12] The Fresno Art Museum and the Visual and Performing Arts department have formed a partnership to provide a direct visual arts experience to every third grade student in Fresno Unified. The pilot program was first implemented in spring of 2013, allowing 1,348 third graders to tour the Museum and participate in specially designed curriculum. The 2014-2015 school year saw 6,099 third grade students come through the Museum as part of the Any Given Child Program.
Part of the programming the Any Given Child program is one exhibition that runs for the entire school year, specifically chosen and headed towards the Any Given Child curriculum. The tours include a classroom experience where each child creates an art project based on the theme of the Any Given Child exhibition. There is a reception held near the end of the school year for the students and their families at the Museum to showcase the chosen artworks. [12]
Judy Chicago is an American feminist artist, art educator, and writer known for her large collaborative art installation pieces about birth and creation images, which examine the role of women in history and culture. During the 1970s, Chicago founded the first feminist art program in the United States at California State University, Fresno which acted as a catalyst for feminist art and art education during the 1970s. Her inclusion in hundreds of publications in various areas of the world showcases her influence in the worldwide art community. Additionally, many of her books have been published in other countries, making her work more accessible to international readers. Chicago's work incorporates a variety of artistic skills, such as needlework, counterbalanced with skills such as welding and pyrotechnics. Chicago's most well known work is The Dinner Party, which is permanently installed in the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum. The Dinner Party celebrates the accomplishments of women throughout history and is widely regarded as the first epic feminist artwork. Other notable art projects by Chicago include International Honor Quilt, Birth Project, Powerplay, and The Holocaust Project. She is represented by Jessica Silverman gallery.
The National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA), located in Washington, D.C., is "the first museum in the world solely dedicated" to championing women through the arts. NMWA was incorporated in 1981 by Wallace and Wilhelmina Holladay. Since opening in 1987, the museum has acquired a collection of more than 6,000 works by more than 1,000 artists, ranging from the 16th century to today. The collection includes works by Mary Cassatt, Alma Woodsey Thomas, Élisabeth Louise Vigée-LeBrun, and Amy Sherald. NMWA also holds the only painting by Frida Kahlo in Washington, D.C., Self-Portrait Dedicated to Leon Trotsky.
The de Young Museum, formally the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum, is a fine arts museum located in San Francisco, California. Located in Golden Gate Park, it is a component of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, along with the Legion of Honor. The de Young is named for early San Francisco newspaperman M. H. de Young.
Ellen Day Hale was an American Impressionist painter and printmaker from Boston. She studied art in Paris and during her adult life lived in Paris, London and Boston. She exhibited at the Paris Salon and the Royal Academy of Arts. Hale wrote the book History of Art: A Study of the Lives of Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian, and Albrecht Dürer and mentored the next generation of New England female artists, paving the way for widespread acceptance of female artists.
Faith Wilding is a Paraguayan American multidisciplinary artist - which includes but is not limited to: watercolor, performance art, writing, crocheting, knitting, weaving, and digital art. She is also an author, educator, and activist widely known for her contribution to the progressive development of feminist art. She also fights for ecofeminism, genetics, cyberfeminism, and reproductive rights. Wilding is Professor Emerita of performance art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
June Claire Wayne was an American painter, printmaker, tapestry innovator, educator, and activist. She founded Tamarind Lithography Workshop (1960–1970), a then California-based nonprofit print shop dedicated to lithography.
The feminist art movement in the United States began in the early 1970s and sought to promote the study, creation, understanding and promotion of women's art. First-generation feminist artists include Judy Chicago, Miriam Schapiro, Suzanne Lacy, Judith Bernstein, Sheila de Bretteville, Mary Beth Edelson, Carolee Schneeman, Rachel Rosenthal, and many other women. They were part of the Feminist art movement in the United States in the early 1970s to develop feminist writing and art. The movement spread quickly through museum protests in both New York and Los Angeles, via an early network called W.E.B. that disseminated news of feminist art activities from 1971 to 1973 in a nationally circulated newsletter, and at conferences such as the West Coast Women's Artists Conference held at California Institute of the Arts and the Conference of Women in the Visual Arts, at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, D.C..
Ruth Aiko Asawa was an American modernist artist known primarily for her abstract looped-wire sculptures inspired by natural and organic forms. In addition to her three-dimensional work, Asawa created an extensive body of works on paper, including abstract and figurative drawings and prints influenced by nature, particularly flowers and plants, and her immediate surroundings.
Judy Pfaff is an American artist known mainly for installation art and sculptures, though she also produces paintings and prints. Pfaff has received numerous awards for her work, including a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 2004 and grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1983) and the National Endowment for the Arts. Major exhibitions of her work have been held at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, the Denver Art Museum and Saint Louis Art Museum. In 2013 she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Video interviews can be found on Art 21, Miles McEnery Gallery, MoMa, Mount Holyoke College Art Museum and other sources.
Scott Allen Shaver is a fine art photographer, a manager and a civil engineer.
Patti Warashina is an American artist known for her imaginative ceramic sculptures. Often constructing her sculptures using porcelain, Warashina creates narrative and figurative art. Her works are in the collection of the Museum of Arts and Design, New York, National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
Carlos Villa was a Filipino-American visual artist, curator and faculty member in the Painting Department at the San Francisco Art Institute. His work often explored the meaning of cultural diversity and sought to expand awareness of multicultural issues in the arts.
Helen Anne Molesworth is an American curator of contemporary art based in Los Angeles. From 2014 to 2018, she was the Chief Curator at The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles.
The Feminist Art Program (FAP) was a college-level art program for women developed in 1970 by artist Judy Chicago and continued by artists Rita Yokoi, Miriam Schapiro, and others. The FAP began at Fresno State College, as a way to address gender inequities in art education, and the art world in general. In 1971, Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro brought the FAP to the newly formed California Institute of the Arts, leaving Rita Yokoi to run the Fresno FAP until her retirement in 1992. The FAP at California Institute of the Arts was active until 1976. The students in the Feminist Art Program read women writers, studied women artists, and made art about being a woman based on group consciousness-raising sessions. Often, the program was separate from the rest of the art school to allow the women to develop in a greenhouse-like environment and away from discerning critiques. While the separatist ideology has been critiqued as reinforcing gender, the FAP has made a lasting impression on feminist art which can be seen in retrospectives, group exhibitions, and creative re-workings of the original projects.
Nancy Youdelman is a mixed media sculptor who lives and works in Clovis, California. She also taught art at California State University, Fresno from 1999 until her retirement in 2013. "Since the early 1970s Youdelman has been transforming clothing into sculpture, combining women's and girl's dresses, hats, gloves, shoes, and undergarments with a variety of organic materials and common household objects.
Judy Onofrio is an American artist who lives and works in Rochester, Minnesota, United States.
The International Honor Quilt is a collective feminist art project initiated in 1980 by Judy Chicago as a companion piece to The Dinner Party. The piece is a collection of 539 two-foot-long quilted triangles that honor women from around the world. Through the Flower, Chicago's not-for-profit organization, gifted the collection to University of Louisville Hite Art Institute in 2013 to be available for research and to exhibit.
Nancy Genn is an American artist living and working in Berkeley, California known for works in a variety of media, including paintings, bronze sculpture, printmaking, and handmade paper rooted in the Japanese washi paper making tradition. Her work explores geometric abstraction, non-objective form, and calligraphic mark making, and features light, landscape, water, and architecture motifs. She is influenced by her extensive travels, and Asian craft, aesthetics and spiritual traditions.
Sylvia Lark (1947–1990) was a Native American/Seneca artist, curator, and educator. She best known as an Abstract expressionist painter and printmaker. Lark lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for many years.
Oliver Lee Jackson is an American painter, sculptor, draftsman, printmaker, and educator. His art studio is in Oakland, California. He was a professor at the California State University, Sacramento from 1971 until 2002, and developed a curriculum for the Pan African Studies program at the school.
36°46′15″N119°46′26″W / 36.7708°N 119.7739°W
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