In 1970, Suzanne Lacy was a second-year graduate student in psychology when she entered Fresno State's burgeoning Feminist Art Program. Her education, and ultimate career, charted new art territories that incorporated training in carpentry skills, consciousness raising, and an emotive feminist approach to conceptual strategies.

"The reason I got into teaching was that it was the closest thing to art I could be doing to make a living; it wasn’t art, and it wasn’t actually teaching. And then I just decided, “Well, listen, it looks like I’m going to be doing this most of my life, and I’m going to have fun doing it,” so I decided to make it as much like art as I could, given the parameters of the teaching situation. I finally think it came to a point like that, that one will loop back on through the other, that my art would be sort of an example or illustrative or a metaphor, for what things I was dealing with in class. And I was going at my class much like I would do art, which was basically trying to be as formed as possible but open to chance."