May Stevens


May Stevens was an American feminist artist, political activist, educator, and writer.

Early life and education

May Stevens was born in Boston to working-class parents, Alice Dick Stevens and Ralph Stanley Stevens, and grew up in Quincy, Massachusetts. She had one brother, Stacey Dick Stevens, who died of pneumonia at the age of fifteen. By Stevens's account, her father expressed his racism at home but "never said these things publicly, nor did he act on them—to my knowledge. But he said them over and over."
Stevens earned a B.F.A. at the Massachusetts College of Art, and studied at the Académie Julian in Paris and Art Students League in New York City. She was granted an MFA equivalency by the New York City Board of Education in 1960 and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College in 1988-89. After attending art school she married Rudolf Baranik, who was also an activist artist in 1948.

Work

Over the course of her career, Stevens tended to work in series. Her body of work divides into several periods, each characterized by a particular theme or concern. She said that she "start with an idea and I always have more to say about it." While her political commitment drove her earlier work, her later works tend to be lyrical.

Freedom Riders

The first series influenced by her political awareness is a group of paintings called Freedom Riders exhibited in 1963 at the Roko Gallery in New York. At her husband's request Martin Luther King, Jr. agreed to sign his name to the catalog's forward, in which the Freedom Riders' actions were praised as deserving mention in song and painting. These are the first works by Stevens in which her political awareness influenced the subject of her paintings. Based on the Freedom Riders, civil rights activists who challenged segregation in the South through riding segregated buses and registering voters, Freedom Riders, a haunting black and white lithograph of individual portraits, was also the title of a work in this exhibition. Although Stevens did not participate in their activities she strongly supported the Civil rights movement, and had taken part in protests in Washington, DC. In another work in the exhibition, Honor Roll,the names of James Meredith, Harvey Gantt, and five other African American men, women, and children who were active in attempts to integrate schools in the South are scratched on the surface as if they were listed on a school's honor roll for academic distinction, Most of Stevens's Freedom Riders paintings were based images in newspapers and on television.

Big Daddy

Stevens created her Big Daddy series between 1967 and 1976, coinciding with the U.S. escalation of involvement in Vietnam. The image of "Big Daddy" is based on a painting she made of her father watching television in his undershirt in 1967 Although the Big Daddy figure was initially inspired by Stevens' anger towards her father, whom she has characterized as an ordinary working-class man, with pro-war, pro-establishment, anti-Semitic, and profoundly racist attitudes, ultimately the figure became transmuted into a more universal symbol of patriarchal imperialism. In expansive, predominantly red, white and blue images that show the iinfluence of Pop Art, she created a homogenized, phallic, ignorant, male persona that acted as a visual metaphor for all that she felt was hypocritical and unjust in the patriarchal power dynamics of family life. Stevens showed her metaphoric 'Big Daddy' in many guises. In Big Daddy Paper Doll, he is centrally seated holding a pug dog on his lap, surrounded by an array of cut-out costumes: an executioner, soldier, policeman, and butcher. Although the bullet shaped head and bulldog on his lap exaggerate his potential violence and power, through the metaphor of the cut-out, Stevens contains his potency. In Pax Americana 1973, he sits helmet on head, pug dog on lap, as if clothed in the stars and stripes of the flag. Her work held a questioning mirror up to many Americans and what she considered to be their unconsidered positions on racial and sexually equality and foreign policy.

Feminist Historical Revisions

During the early through mid 1970s, Stevens became increasingly involved in feminist political activities, making the connection between women's struggle against oppression and the civil rights and anti-war movements. As in her previous work, her political awareness was reflected in her art. After reading Linda Nochlin's essay "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?," Stevens became interested in Artemisia Gentileschi, and in 1976 she painted a nine-foot portrait of Artemisia Gentileschi for a feminist collaborative installation called The Sister Chapel. Between 1974 and 1981, Stevens created three large pictures that she called History Paintings. The series' title refers to the academic tradition of history painting but Stevens reconfigured art historical tropes from the perspective of her own life and other women artists to whom she was connected, drawing upon both her personal and political history In Artist's Studio , 1974 she placed herself in front of one of her Big Daddy paintings, in the pivotal position held by Courbet in his work, The Painter's Studio. Soho Women Artists is a group portrait of women in Stevens's political and artistic circle, including Lucy R. Lippard, Miriam Schapiro, Joyce Kozloff, and Harmony Hammond, who along with Stevens were among the founders of the Heresies Collective, which also, from 1977–83, published the journal "Heresies: A feminist publication on arts and politics." Mysteries and Politics, is reminiscent of a sacred conversation, in this case between thirteen women who influenced Stevens in their efforts to integrate their feminist politics, creativity, and family life.

Ordinary/Extraordinary

In her next series, Ordinary/Extraordinary, painted between 1976 and 1978, Stevens juxtaposed two women - Alice Stevens, her working-class, Irish Catholic mother and Rosa Luxembourg, the Polish Marxist philosopher and social activist, in order to compare, contrast, and ultimately find resonances between these two seemingly different women and their differing life paths - one private, in which her own interests were ignored, and the other public, yet whose powerful ideas and presence ultimately led to her destruction. Specifically, she wanted to "erode the polarized notion that one woman's life was special and the other forgettable." The figures had appeared together in two previous works, a collage originally published in Heresies, and in the painting Mysteries and Politics, discussed above. The works in this series are large and powerful. In Go Gentle constructed through a cascade of photographs, Stevens in her presentation of her mother who seems to press against the plane of the canvas, echoes but contradicts Dylan Thomas' wish for his father to "not go gentle into that goodnight." Alice alone is the subject of the monumental five-paneled Alice in the Garden, where she holds a bunch of dandelions, which Stevens' describes having thrown at her when she visited her mother at the nursing home where she spent her last years.

Later works: Sea of Words, Bodies of Water

Water was an important element of Stevens last two series, Sea of Words, and Rivers and Other Bodies of Water. By the 1990s, Stevens began to use words in her works; as she said, "words are everywhere." In the painting Sea of Words, four luminous, wraithlike boats float on a glimmering "sea" constructed through semi-readable lines of flowing words, taken from the writings of both Virginia Woolf and Julia Kristeva. In her later works water itself became a major theme, as in Three Boats On a Green Sea. Throughout her life water was special and evocative to her - she has written of the experience of swimming as a child and also the poem "Standing in A River" as an adult, in which she describes minnows swimming around her legs. The water is also a way of expressing grief for her lost loved ones, whose ashes she scattered in rivers, her son, her mother, and her husband.

Exhibitions and recognition

Stevens’ has exhibited widely throughout her life. She moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico in 1998 and in 1999, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, had a major retrospective of her work, entitled Images of Women Near and Far 1983-1997, the museum's first exhibition for a living female artist. Her solo exhibition in 2006 at the Minneapolis Institute of Art traveled to Springfield Museum of Art, MO and National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC. Stevens’ work is in numerous museum collections, including the British Museum; Brooklyn Museum; Cleveland Museum; Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge; Metropolitan Museum of Art; Minneapolis Institute of Fine Arts; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum of Modern Art, NY; National Academy of Design, NY; National Museum of Women in the Arts; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and Whitney Museum of American Art.

Awards

Stevens is the recipient of numerous awards including the College Art Association Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement as an artist, poet, social activist, and teacher, 10 MacDowell Colony residencies, Women's Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement Award, Bunting Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship in painting, National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in painting, Andy Warhol Foundation Award. Other awards include the 1958 New England Annual Landscape Priz, 1968–69 National Institute of Arts and Letters Child Hassam Purchase Award, 1983 National Endowment for the Arts Grant in Painting, 1988–89 Bunting Fellowship, Radcliffe College, 1990 WCA Honor Award for Lifetime Achievement, and the 2004 Edwin Palmer Memorial Prize for Painting, National Academy of Design.

Selected exhibitions