ABSTRACT
A new twist in a typical old-boy network transplanted the urban activist, idealist, and budding feminist—Judy Gerowitz—from sprawling, restless Los Angeles to the more compact and centered Fresno. Isolated amid the densely cultivated fields, orchards, and monster dairies of the Central Valley, Fresno was a stark contrast to Los Angeles. Calibrated to georgic and bucolic industry, Fresno State College had grown from its origin in 1911 as a normal school—training mostly women as teachers for the prosperous farming region. […] The 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 construction when Judy came on the scene. The art department’s men—both traditionalist and more vanguard—could hardly have foreseen that her ambitious drive would transform their classrooms and campus so dramatically.
