May Stevens

May Stevens (June 9, 1924 – December 9, 2019) 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.

Stevens earned a B.F.A. at the Massachusetts College of Art (1946), and studied at the Académie Julian in Paris (1948) and Art Students League in New York City (1948).

Activism Stevens' artwork frequently reflects her personal experiences and history. One instance of this is her "Sisters of the Revolution" series (1973-1976), which was inspired by her family's history of radical activism. The series portrays women from various historical periods who participated in revolutionary struggles, and Stevens utilized her family photographs as references for her paintings. Through this artwork, Stevens aimed to shed light on the significant yet frequently overlooked roles that women have played in political movements. Stevens was a founding member of the feminist group the Guerrilla Girls.

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." in which the Freedom Riders' actions were praised as deserving mention in song and painting. Most of Stevens's Freedom Riders paintings were based images in newspapers and on television. The series features images of her own father, as well as historical figures such as Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler, and includes text that critiques patriarchal power structures. 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. Stevens showed her metaphoric 'Big Daddy' in many guises. In Big Daddy Paper Doll (1970), 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. 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 which also, from 1977 to 1983, published the journal "Heresies: A feminist publication on arts and politics." Mysteries and Politics (1978), 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. 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 (1983) 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 good night." In the painting Sea of Words (1990–91), 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.

One of Stevens' Freedom Riders series was selected to illustrate the 1961 Freedom Riders in a 2005 panel of United States postage stamps called, "To Form a More Perfect Union." The panel of 37 cent stamps commemorated ten major milestones of the Civil Rights Movement with artwork from different artists.

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, the Brooklyn Museum, the Cleveland Museum, The Fogg Art Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, National Academy of Design, NY, National Museum of Women in the Arts, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College, and Whitney Museum of American Art. Stevens' work was included in the 2022 exhibition Women Painting Women at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.

In 2023, the MassArt Art Museum (MAAM), at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston, opened May Stevens: My Mothers, a major career retrospective after the artist's passing in 2019. The show explored Stevens's interest in portraying her mother in juxtaposition with the image of Polish-German activist Rosa Luxemburg.