Stevens, May

STEVENS, MAY (1924-2019). A lifelong artist, activist, and intellectual, May Stevens was raised in a working-class New England family with a beloved but bigoted father (later the model for her Big Daddy series) and a mother seriously depressed after the death of her only son (later, with Rosa Luxemburg, the subject of her Ordinary/Extraordinary series). Stevens graduated from the Massachusetts College of Art and then moved to New York to attend the Art Students League, where she met and married Rudolf Baranik, an artist, Lithuanian Jew, and self-described Socialist formalist. The couple studied in Paris, and in 1951 she made her first powerful anti-racist work, when her son Steven was a baby.

After returning to New York, teaching first in a high school and then at the School of Visual Arts, Stevens continued working with civil rights issues. In 1963 Martin Luther King Jr. agreed to sign a paragraph (written by Baranik) to introduce her Freedom Riders show. One of those paintings was later made into a US postal stamp. She and Rudolf and Steven heard Dr. King’s I Have a Dream speech in Washington, DC. When Malcolm X was assassinated, they paid homage at a Harlem funeral home -- the subject of a portrait drawing.

In the late 1960s Baranik was an organizer of the Artists and Writers Protest against the war in Vietnam, and they both participated in The Collage of Indignation and in the Art Workers Coalition, demanding an end to the undeclared war and social injustice. In 1970, when the women’s art movement hit New York, Stevens’s Big Daddies bridged the gap between anti-war and feminism. She joined demonstrations and actions at the city’s museums, always identifying with the pain and resilience of women and People of Color, who held special places in her work. Her paintings about the lives of her mother and Rosa Luxemburg as well as a stunning portraits of Artemesia Gentileschi and Lucy Parsons (a heroine of the Haymarket labor protests of 1886), among others, became feminist icons. Stevens was also an original Guerrilla Girl, part of a New York feminist artists group, formed in 1985, that wore gorilla masks for political performances exposing sexism and racism.

In 1976-1977 Stevens was a founding member of the collective/publication Heresies: A Feminist Journal of Art and Politics. A published writer and poet, she loved words, stories, and drama. But as a visual artist she aspired to represent the unrepresentable, to offer images where words failed. Her Tic-Tac-Toe series, collages often marked with brutal cigarette burns, was inspired by the tragic story of Eliza Isquierda, an abused and murdered child. And finally came the huge unstretched canvases of watery landscapes, beginning with the Berlin canal into which Rosa Luxemburg’s body was thrown by her murderers.

The couple moved to New Mexico in 1996, following fellow Heretics Harmony Hammond, Sabra Moore, and me. Baranik died in 1998 and Stevens made several paintings about her own aging body. “Just earning a living, not living a mental life, and not trying to change things,” she said, “was a life that was frightening to me.”

Hills, Patricia, ed. May Stevens. Ordinary/Extraordinary: A Summation,1977-1984. Boston: University Art Gallery, 1984. .

Shapiro, Barbara Stern. May Stevens: Images of Women Near and Far. Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1999.