May Stevens
| May Stevens | |
|---|---|
| Born |
May Stevens June 9, 1924 Boston, Massachusetts, U.S. |
| Education |
Massachusetts College of Art Art Students League of New York Académie Julian Bunting Institute, Radcliffe College |
| Known for | Painting Drawings and prints Books and manuscripts |
| Notable work |
Freedom Riders (1963) Big Daddy series (1968-76) Artemesia Gentileschi series (1974-79) History Paintings series (1974-81) Ordinary/Extraordinary series (1976-91) SoHo Women Artists (1978) Sea of Words series (1990) Rivers and Other Bodies of Water series (2001) |
| Movement | Feminist art |
May Stevens (born June 9, 1924) is an American feminist artist, political activist, educator, and writer. Major works include: Freedom Riders (1963), "Big Daddy" series (1968–1976), Ordinary/Extraordinary (1976), and SoHo Women Artists (1978). In 1977, she was one of the featured artists discussed in a seminar given by Jacqueline Moss at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum. The seminar was titled "The Women's Movement: Iconography, Esthetics".
Stevens was born to working-class parents, Alice Dick Stevens and Ralph Stanley Stevens, in Boston, Massachusetts and grew up in Quincy. Stevens had one brother, Stacey Dick Stevens who died of pneumonia at the age of fifteen.
May Stevens studied at the Massachusetts College of Art, the Art Students League and the Academie Julian in Paris. She began her first major painting series in 1963, Freedom Riders (with catalogue essay by Martin Luther King, Jr.) before moving to New York in 1967, where she lived and maintained studios with her husband, Rudolf Baranik, until 1997. During this time, she taught at the School of Visual Arts (1961–96). Other well-known painting series include Big Daddy (1967–76); Artemesia Gentileschi (1974–79); History Paintings (1974–81); Ordinary Extraordinary / Rosa Luxemburg and Alice Stevens (1976-91); Sea of Words (begun in 1990); and Rivers and Other Bodies of Water, (begun in 2001). Stevens helped found the magazine Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics, published from 1977 to 1992.
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.
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 (2001), 10 MacDowell Colony residencies, Women’s Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement Award, Bunting Fellowship (1990), Guggenheim Fellowship in painting (1986), National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in painting (1983), Andy Warhol Foundation Award (2001).
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