1
A radical act of institutional critique in the educational sphere can be found in Judy Chicagoâs withdrawal of female art students from the campus of Fresno State College (now California State University, Fresno) in 1970. Referring to the marginal number of women working as professional artists after graduation, Chicago proposed this dislocation and, thus, the founding of the Feminist Art Program (FAP) as a countermeasure (Chicago, 1982, p. 70). This off-campus space was intended to enable womenâs inquiry into the techniques and content of artistic practices away from the institution, which was deemed male-dominated. The development of her educational process depended on Chicagoâs search for a place that would allow her to distance herself from the Los Angeles art scene (Levin, 2018, p. 137) and the art education she had received (Chicago, 2014, p. 22). As Laura Meyerâs research illuminated, the lesser-known Fresno FAP has to be recognized as a precedent for the FAP at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) and the project Womanhouse (1971/1972),1 which âcould never have been founded ex nihilo at CalArtsâ (Meyer, 2009, p. 5).2 Therefore, the Fresno feminist educational space, which was thought of as âa room of oneâs ownâ after Virginia Woolf (Wilding, 2009, p. 80), has to be credited with having laid the groundwork for the development of novel art practices, such as collaboration, consciousness-raising as a source of content, and the exploration of traditional female connotated media such as needlework, as well as video and photography, performance, role-playing, and the use of costume.
In both cases, the Fresno and CalArts FAP, the withdrawal of female students from the campus is generally seen both as the springboard for the development of feminist pedagogy and art making and as producing predominantly white feminist spaces. Lesser attention has been paid to the environmental, performative, and collective works Chicago created on the Fresno State campus before founding the FAP. In the course of a mixed-gender, site-specific sculpture class in the spring term of 1970, Chicago and her students staged smoke atmospheres on the construction site of the Art Department. While her two smoke works at museum sites were deemed to display a critical stance towards the institutionâher Santa Barbara Museum Atmosphere (1969) left burn marks on the façade of the museum (Hopkins, 2023, p. 56)3âher smoke works on the Fresno campus have to be regarded as enacting an equally critical stance towards the institutional framework albeit, in this instance, the educational institution. This critical intervention becomes particularly significant given that the smoke atmospheres emerged amid the student protests, boycotts, and political upheaval that gripped the campus in spring 1970, positioning the collective and performative smoke works within a broader context of the contestation of the educational institution.
2 Smoke Pedagogy: âDisappearing the Art Buildingâ
relatively unknown California State College of about twelve thousand students is an ideal source of study, for what happened at Fresno State during the past decade is largely what has happened at similar colleges and universities throughout the United States.
Miss Chicago [â¦] made points soon after she arrived on campus for the spring semester. [â¦] she held an art demonstration on the site of the new Art Building, at the time only a hole in the ground. The demonstration was called a smoke Atmosphere. It employed chemical smoke, thick and multihued, which could be sculpted in the air. Unfortunately, an unseemly wind somewhat ruined the effect. (Levin, 2018, p. 134)6
The tense situation on campus had still not eased by the time the second atmosphere was staged on the construction site in April 1970. The riots continued, and further demonstrations unfolded in response to the killing of four students at Kent State University in early May, and this resulted in a declaration of emergency on the Fresno campus on May 19 (Seib, 1979, pp. 69, 73).
Judy Chicago, Atmosphere: Disappearing the Art Building, Fresno State College, 1970. © 1970 Judy Chicago. Courtesy of the artist and the Nevada Museum of Art
As becomes evident in the photographic documentation, a fundamental concern of Chicagoâs work with smoke lies in disturbing perception through dissolving spatial parameters and disguising the architecture through optical intervention. Looking back, Chicago herself remembers the atmosphere as an attempt âto try and âdisappearâ that masculine looking structureâ (Levin, 2018, p. 134). Whereas her atmospheres have been regarded as âfeminizingâ the environment (Pinder, 2023, p. 52), there is an underlying impetus to the work and its use of flares at this historical moment that is related to violence, death, and militarization. In the same year as Chicagoâs smoke atmospheres on the Fresno Campus, Chris Burden, in his performance piece, Deadman (1970), placed flares around his supposedly dead body, which was covered by a tarpaulin as he lay on La Cienega Boulevard in front of the Riko Mizuno Gallery in Los Angeles. Phillip Kaiser (2019, p. 25) read Deadman as an example of the evocation of death in works by the Southern California artists at a moment in which âdeath was omnipresent in the military infrastructure located in Southern Californiaâs industrial complexâ and which, therefore, reflected âthe trauma of the Vietnam War, which lasted until the mid-1970s.â The invocation of death and militarization of the smoke works in the context of the university campus linked them back to the violence that ignited in the course of student riots and to the milieu that the university presented for the contestation of the USâs military invasion into Southeast Asia. In this context, it is particularly striking that the smoke atmosphere on the Fresno campus was referred to as an âart demonstrationâ in the Staff Bulletin quoted above. The term âdemonstrationâ denotes a reading of the work as coming together or uniting in the expression of dissent or with the intention of revolt. As Moira Roth (1983, p. 94) stated in her early historiography of the womenâs performance movement, such dialectics of performative practices and social rights movements must be considered critical for the burgeoning performance movement of the 1970s. Faith Wilding (2009, p. 94), one of Chicagoâs students at the FAP, described this interrelationship by writing, âSitting in at a lunch counter, occupying a building, blocking a street, marching and singing, were performative acts that enacted changing social relations and body politics.â All of Chicagoâs atmospheres display a collective, performative approach, with friends, fellow artists, and pyrotechnicians involved in the process of lighting and dispersing the smoke. However, the notion that students were
Whereas Chicagoâs atmospheres in urban settings can be considered to have critically engaged with the built environment, the staging of the atmosphere within the construction site of the new building of the Universityâs Art Department represents a particular configuration that should be further examined.8 Staging the smoke work within the construction site drew attention to the physical supporting structures of the institutional space and to the material reality of its edification, thereby hinting at their meaning as symbolic carriers for social and educative issues. The construction site, in turn, can be read within the historical context of the rapid growth of the educational sector in the aftermath of the Sputnik shock as marked by the entry of the Soviet Unionâs satellite into space in 1957.9 In the 1960s and 70s, it was âparticularly striking and in many ways novel [how â¦] architectural design was put into the service of the educational aimsâ (Muthesius, 2000, p. 21). In the wake of the increasing awareness of the influence that the built environment had on the learning process, the idiom of a âschool without wallsâ presented a progressive planning concept for inclusive and flexible learning environments that facilitated student participation and self-determination in the learning process (Holert, 2021, pp. 50â54). Against this backdrop, enveloping the construction site in hues of colored smoke intervened in the material conditions of the construction of the learning environment by simultaneously laying bare the material framework of the educational institution and letting it disappear. As a result, the built environment was questioned as a prerequisite for learning in the context of a site-specific sculpture class that, itself, presented a break with the spatial parameters of studio art education. As Chicago (2014, p. 20) reflected, her utopian wish for the establishment of a womenâs art community that would provide the âmeans to show, distribute, and sell [artworks by women artists]; teaching other women artmaking skills; and establishing and writing our own historyâ seemed feasible in the climate of the 1970s when âradical change was in the air.â Considering the atmospheres as interventions on campus, the metaphorical meaning of radical change lingering in the air is tied back to the deployment of smoke as a pedagogical tool. The smoke interventions performatively engaged with the relation of the body to the building of the educational institution, and it can well be regarded as posing an approach to the questioning of the means of access and participation within the institution and of the spatial policy of the educational environment.
3
bomb scares caused building evacuations, antiwar marches and demonstrations took place weekly, five professors had been fired for their political activism. Most of the women we interviewed were art students, some of whom were already taking Chicagoâs outdoor site sculpture class. (1994, p. 34)
Personnel decisions repeatedly led to protests, such as those following the controversial dismissal of faculty, including the Black rights activist Marvin X and other instructors from the Ethnic Studies Program and the English Department, among them Everett Frost, Faith Wildingâs husband at the time (Seib, 1979, pp. 20â33, 54). Against this backdrop of institutional repression, Chicago decided to break with the traditional institutional framework and curriculum, meeting 15 selected students off campus, alternating between the private spaces of the participants involved until they signed a 7-month lease for a 5,000-square-foot building for which each student paid $25 per month to cover rent, tools, and further expenses (Wilding, 1994, p. 34). The former barracks were located in a run-down part of the city, at the opposite end of town from the University, and henceforth, as Karen LeCocq, one of the FAP students, elucidated, âfar away from the prying critical eyes of the male-dominated Art Departmentâ (Youdelman & LeCocq, 2012, p. 71).
Chicago deemed the renting of a space to be a fundamental step in the pedagogical process through which she introduced her students to the professional artistâs need for a studio space (Levin, 2018, p. 145). In addition to the studio space, the barracks provided a spacious kitchen used to cook weekly studio dinners (Youdelman & LeCocq, 2012, p. 65), a darkroom was installed, and a long shelf in the storage room off the kitchen was converted into a âfilm-editing table for splicing Super-8 film.â10 As Wilding (2009, p. 87) described, âthere was an office with a telephone, a small library, and an art history research space
One of the initial tasks Chicago presented her students was to build a forty-foot-long drywall. The assignment aimed to introduce the students to technical skills, to the use of tools, and to construction techniques, as well as the need to wear appropriate attire for physical work such as work boots (Roth, 2012, p. 80). This contested a crucial step in Chicagoâs eyes as âthe fixing-up process seemed a natural way for the women to learn to use tools, develop building skills, and gain confidence in themselves physicallyâ (Garrard/Broude, 1994, p. 67). As Wilding reflected, âThe âWallâ was as much symbolic as it was real; it defined our big exhibition/performance/studio spaceâ (Wilding, 1994, p. 87). As Wollenman Johnson recalled, the wall was built opposite the entrance to the studio. Its position created a theatre-like setting with the wall functioning as a backdrop for performances and role-plays, and the partitioned-off space behind the wall as a costume storage and changing area (see Figure 8.2).11
Judy Chicago, Janice Lester in the Costume Room, Feminist Art Program, Fresno, 1970. © 1970 Judy Chicago. Courtesy of the artist and the Nevada Museum of Art
[t]he most transformative aspect of the studio was how we began to claim and use the space. Since most of us worked and hung out there daily for many hours, we were able to see each otherâs work as it developed, to give suggestions, encouragement and critique, and collaborate technically and conceptually. This organic process of becoming collaborators in a space of our own was one of the secrets of the Programâs astonishing success. (2009, p. 88)
Working off-campus in a building we controlled dissolved the normal academic time and space boundaries. [â¦] Instead of holding structured classes, we worked in groups, rotating responsibility for leadership. The groups included: consciousness-raising; reading/discussion; autobiography writing; photo/film techniques; art-history research; performance and play-acting; studio work with individual instruction from Chicago; group critiques; and Wednesday night dinners for social time. Each woman planned her weekly work schedule and formulated her semesterâs goals according to the credits (between 6 to 15) she was receiving from the college. We soon developed strong emotional and psychological bonds. Most of us ended up working (and practically living) at the studio every day. (1994, pp. 34â35)
The spending of social time together in the educational space was supported by incorporating facets of the domestic in the form of furnishings, shared meals, and a general approach of consistently spending time together. In addition to the kitchen, which provided room for social gatherings, the ârapâ room, furnished with carpet scraps, was dedicated to consciousness-raising sessions (Meyer, 2009, p. 7), the collective coming into consciousness about the social implications of personal experiences and feelings. The blending of the private with the educational space was further enhanced by the fact that one of the students, Cheryl Zurilgen, lived on the second floor with her partner, who worked in the studio downstairs, opposite the FAP studio.13 The juxtaposition
The capacity for both conflict and nurturing within the same space reveals the complex implications of the FAPâs spatial experiment, which fundamentally traversed the idea of the educational sphere as a counterpart to the private realm. Thus, the feminist pedagogical space of the FAP in Fresno resembled spatial programs of socialist utopian cooperative living. At the Chicago Hull-House (founded 1889 by Jane Addams), for example, through the âequalitarian division of laborâdomestic, logistical, pedagogical, and socioculturalâat odds with mainstream political institutionsâ all facets of living blended together as the âbedrooms were regularly borrowed for activities such as the making of costumes for the play put on at Hull-Houseâ (Gourbe, 2015, p. 15). While it is acknowledged that the feminist pedagogical spaces of the 1970s had their precedents in such settlement movements, it is important to point out that while the educational space at the FAP in Fresno incorporated facets of the domestic, it simultaneously represented a conscious withdrawal from the private realm. In aiming to convince her students of the need for a studio space, Chicago pointed out the limitations that the home posed for artistic creation declaring that âYou canât make an eight-foot painting in your bedroomâ (Levin, 2018, p. 145). In contrast, being part of the FAP enabled the students to work in a designated studio space, to execute large-scale pieces, and experiment with a variety of materials. Thus, the artistic practice was brought from the individual private realm into the shared studio space that, in turn, integrated aspects of the private into the educational process, thereby opening up room to speak about the personal.
4 Concluding Remarks
Taking the smoke atmospheres as precedents for the FAP reveals a continuous engagement with educational space as pedagogical toolâdemonstrating how Chicagoâs initial performative interventions on campus established the spatial critique that would define the feminist pedagogical experiment. The
However, it can be argued that rather than constituting a mere escape from political and social struggles on campus, this investigation also reveals how Chicagoâs atmospheres emerged from and were embedded in the campus protestsâ practices of politicized engagement with and critique of the educational institution. Thus, both provided a catalyst for the dissolution of the time-space boundaries of education that characterized the FAP, whose collective, performative approach, exploration into the personal, as well as materials and practices deemed inappropriate for the traditional canon of art, mark the reason for its historically significant role as âone of the most important sites for the development of a politicized approach to the making and theorizing of feminist artâ (Jones, 2007, p. 300).
This trajectory, from smoke atmospheres to feminist pedagogy, ultimately demonstrates how artistic practices and political protest were inextricably intertwined on the contested American university campus, reciprocally influencing and transforming each other to catalyze innovation and generate novel forms of art production, while simultaneously illuminating the enduring complexities of separatist strategies within broader movements for educational and social justice.
Notes
After the FAP moved to the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) in 1971 and was subsequently co-taught by Chicago and Miriam Schapiro, the dislocation of the students into a derelict mansion off campus led to the creation of the seminal project Womanhouse (1972). The students renovated the house and installed artworks that addressed the gendered connotations of the home and womenâs roles within the family; the resulting exhibition ran from January 30 until February 28, 1972. For a detailed history of the FAP at CalArts and Womanhouse, see, for example, Broude and Garrard (1994), Chicago (1975), Kaiser and Végh (2021), and Levin (2018).
Similarly, Faith Wilding, a student at the FAP at Fresno State College and CalArts points to the political activism and the establishment of a womenâs reading group by her and Suzanne Lacy. These circumstances âwere auspicious for the success of Judy Chicagoâs plan to teach an all-womenâs art classâ, see Wilding, 2009, p. 84.
As Chicago retrospectively stated in the context of the reading of her smoke works at museum spaces as forms of institutional critique: âIt looked like the museum was on fire. I loved that, [â¦] because, of course, museums were not exactly hospitable to women artistsâ (as cited in Gotthardt, 2017). For a general reading of Chicagoâs atmospheres in relation to Land Art, a key resource is the conversation between Philipp Kaiser and Judy Chicago (Nevada Museum of Art, 2019).
In late 1970, Dextra Frankel invited Chicago to Cal-State Fullerton, this time for a solo exhibition of her recent body of work, the Pasadena Lifesavers, doughnut shaped forms sprayed on sheets of acrylic, and her Domes, half spheres in pairs of three mounted on tables that were formed out of Plexiglas as well as photos of her atmospheres. The exhibition invitation announced the change of her name, from Gerowitz, the name of her deceased husband, to Chicago, the name of her birth city. In October, the announcement was printed in Artforum 9(2), October 1970, two months before Chicagoâs eponymous Boxing Ring Ad in Artforum 9(4), December 1970.
Frankel, D. (1970). Judy Gerowitz [Press material for the Cal-State Fullerton exhibition]. Dextra Frankel papers (UA-194 DF_Box1_F12). University Archives and Special Collections, California State University, Fullerton, CA, United States.
Gail Levin writes that Dal Handerson, faculty of Fresno State, took photos of performances by Chicago that she staged with her students (2018, p. 134).
On the left half of the photo, standing on a small elevation, another figure has turned the back towards the camera. Considering the stature and the full, dark, curly hair, the figure can be identified as Judy Chicago amidst the lighting of the flares by participants.
As Gail Levin in her biography on Judy Chicago contextualizes the erection of the building: âThe department of fine arts was favored by a local philanthropist and trustee who worked in ceramics herself and had facilitated a new edifice for the arts building that was under
Tom Holert pointed out the connection between the education sector and space conquest in the context of the research on the education crisis in the aftermath of the Sputnik shock (Holert, 2021, pp. 18â19).
S. Wollenman Johnson (personal communication, September 6, 2024).
S. Wollenman Johnson (personal communication, August 12, 2024).
S. Wollenman Johnson (personal communication, August 12, 2024). While the lack of studio space could be read in the context of a displacement of women artists into private, domestic working spaces when discussing feminist art education, it is important to point out that this lack of designated studio space on the Fresno State College campus affected all art students. In response to this limitation, the Fresno Feminist Art Program made it a point of providing its students with a dedicated workspace, sharing the costs among the group.
S. Wollenman Johnson (personal communication, August 12, 2024).
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