May Stevens, My Mothers

May Stevens (Painting ’46) believed that politics and artmaking were inexorably intertwined. Through figurative paintings, photocopied and collaged works, colorful political pop canvases, and somber efficient sketches, she criticized American patriarchy, championed the Civil Rights movement, and imbued Marxist ideals into everyday life. Stevens was a self-proclaimed feminist and a leading voice for women’s rights.

Born in Dorchester, MA in 1924, Stevens grew up in a working-class family. In My Mothers, the artist has paired her birth mother Alice Dick Stevens with her “spiritual mother” Marxist revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg. These works are tender explorations of both public and personal struggles; celebrations of revolution and public life; and demonstrations of the mundane and overlooked aging process.

A founding member of both the Guerrilla Girls and the collective feminist journal Heresies, Stevens understood class and gender as a fundamental, and often unspoken, element in art history and liberation movements.