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Editing May Stevens article:

Over the course of her artistic career May Stevens tended to work in series and her body of work divides into several periods, each characterized by a particular theme or concern. While her profound and persistent political commitment drove her earlier work, her later works tend to be more broadly lyrical.

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. In 1976, she painted a nine-foot portrait of Artemisia Gentileschi for a feminist collaborative installation called the Sister Chapel. [9] Between 1974 and 1981, Stevens created three large paintings in which she 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.[9] In Artist's Studio (After Courbet), 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. The full title of this complex work could apply to Stevens' work as well: "a real allegory summing up seven years of my artistic and moral life." Soho Women Artists (1977-78) is a group portrait of women in Stevens's political and artistic circle, including Lucy R. Lippard, Miriam Schapiro, Joyce Kozloff, and Harmony Hammond[10] some of whom, along with Stevens, were founders of the Heresies Collective.[10] which also published the journal "Heresies: A feminist publication on arts and politics," from 1977-93. Mysteries and Politics (1978), is reminiscent of a sacred conversation, in this case between thirteen women who influenced Stevens (those whom she perceived as having a more visceral approach to the world on the left and those who represented the intellectual, on the right).

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,  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 which had originally appeared in Heresies, and in the painting Mysteries and Politicis. The works in this series are large and powerful. In Forming the Fifth International (1985) the two figures sit in a parklike setting, engaged in friendly conversation. 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 goodnight." Alice alone is the subject of the monumental five-panelled Alice in the Garden, where she holds a bunch of dandelions, referring to her last years in a nursing home.

By the 1990s, Stevens began to use words in her works; as she said, "words are everywhere." 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. In her later works water itself became a major theme, as in Three Boats On a Green Sea (1999).