The museum's permanent collection is a study in deliberate eclecticism. Modern and contemporary artworks from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries share gallery space with Mesoamerican artifacts from Mexico and the Andes, Pre-Columbian sculpture, and modern and folk art of Mexican origin. The roster of represented artists reads like a challenge to anyone who thinks of Fresno as merely an agricultural center: Ansel Adams, Ruth Asawa, Salvador Dali, Diego Rivera, Charles Gaines, Norman Rockwell, Andy Warhol. The Maynard Dixon paintings connect the collection to the California landscape tradition, while Clement Renzi and Varaz Samuelian ground it in the state's more experimental currents. This is not a collection assembled by accident. Under director Robert Barrett, who ran the museum from 1980 to 1994, the holdings grew with purpose -- expanding the endowment, building adult education programs through Fresno City College, and pushing an initiative Barrett called "Arts to Zoo" that attempted to link the museum to the broader civic identity.

In 1986, the Fresno Art Museum became the first museum in the United States to devote an entire year of its exhibition schedule exclusively to women artists. The decision was audacious for any museum, let alone one in California's Central Valley. It was also expensive. To match a $25,000 grant, Barrett proposed enlisting one hundred women from the Fresno community, each contributing $250. The idea crystallized into the Council of 100, which held weekly meetings to organize participation and fundraising. More than one hundred women joined. The year of exhibitions ran through 1986 and 1987, and the Council did not disband when it ended. Instead, it became a permanent institution within the museum, continuing to support women artists for decades after that first ambitious season.

Since 1988, the Council of 100 has presented the Distinguished Woman Artist Award annually to an artist who has spent thirty or more years in the studio and created a significant body of work. The honorees read like a roll call of American art's underrecognized figures: June Wayne in 1988, Betye Saar in 1993, Ruth Asawa in 2001, Hung Liu in 2016. Judy Chicago, who taught the first feminist art class in the country at California State University, Fresno, helped lay the intellectual groundwork for the museum's commitment to women artists. The award has brought the museum national recognition, including acknowledgment from the National Women's Museum in Washington, D.C. What began as a fundraising mechanism became one of the longest-running programs in the country dedicated to honoring women's contributions to the visual arts.

The American Association of Museums granted accreditation in 1973, a distinction the museum has maintained through multiple reaccreditations, most recently in 2016. But Barrett and his successors were not content with credentials alone. A successful two-million-dollar funding drive led to the construction of a 14,000-square-foot outdoor sculpture garden, with construction beginning in June 2000. The expansion transformed the museum's relationship with its grounds, moving art into the open air of the San Joaquin Valley -- the same valley whose agricultural identity the museum has spent decades complicating. Fresno grows raisins and almonds and cotton. It also, as the museum insists, grows art. The sculpture garden made that argument physical, placing large-scale works where passersby could encounter them without buying a ticket or even intending to.