Washington, DC—Refresh the spirit with The Water Remembers: Paintings and Works on Paper by May Stevens 1990-2005, on display at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, October 28, 2005-January 15, 2006.

The exhibition features 27 works—13 large-scale paintings and 14 works on paper—by acclaimed artist May Stevens. Luminous, and at times haunting and elegiac, these acrylic paintings, drawings, and prints of waterscapes are serene images that reveal Stevens’ spiritual connection with water and hint at times and places past, and speak of people and loved ones lost to time and death. Enhancing the aquatic landscapes are ethereal and cryptic fragments of text—everything from quotations from authors as varied as Virginia Woolf, Rosa Luxemburg, and Edward Said, to passages taken from Irish poetry dating to the 5th century BCE.

Artist, social activist, educator, and writer May Stevens (b. 1924) has for more than 50 years sustained a passionate commitment to challenging the political, social, and cultural conditions of American life, especially as they affect women.

Born in Boston to a working class family, Stevens came of age as an artist during the socially turbulent ‘60s, achieving prominence with her “Big Daddy” series, Pop-inspired caricatures of authoritarian political figures that confronted—and skewered—the sexism, racism, and militarism endemic in American society.

In the ‘70s and ‘80s, Stevens turned her attention to women’s rights becoming, along with artists Miriam Shapiro and Judy Chicago, one of the leaders of the feminist art movement. Out of this period came her famous “Ordinary/Extraordinary” series, works that graphically contrasted the lives of two women, one “ordinary”—the artist’s mother, Alice Stevens—the other “extraordinary”—socialist revolutionary and martyr, Rosa Luxemburg.

In the 1990s, Stevens’ artistic focus changed dramatically again, from figurative works and feminist-oriented themes to landscapes, particularly lyrical, color-splashed waterscapes. The Water Remembers focuses on these years.

Drawing on experiences from her past, she has created works with great personal meaning and resonance.

In 1981, her only child, Steven, committed suicide by jumping off the George Washington Bridge. His ashes (as well as the ashes of Stevens’ mother, Alice) were scattered on the Hudson River, a tragedy that may be alluded to in two works included in the exhibition: Hudson I (Night Swim), 2000, and Hudson II (Eddy), 1998-2000.

When her husband Rudolph Baranik, a Lithuanian Jew and fellow artist, died in 1998, Stevens scattered his ashes in lakes, rivers, and other bodies of water that they had known and visited over the course of their long marriage. A friend carried some of his ashes back to Lithuania, scattering them at the juncture of two rivers, a scene captured in Confluence of Two Rivers, Vilnele and Neris, Vilnius, Lithuania, 2002-2003.

Also included in the exhibition are scenes of the Charles River in Boston where Stevens’ father took her canoeing as a little girl: Water’s Edge, Charles River, Cambridge, MA, 2002-2003, and Water’s Edge II, Charles River, Cambridge, MA, 2003.

May Stevens currently resides and works in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Her work has been acquired by major national and international museums and she has received numerous awards, including ten MacDowell Colony residences, a Bunting fellowship, a Guggenheim fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and a Women’s Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement Award. The College Art Association honored Stevens in March 2001 with the Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement as an artist, poet, social activist, and teacher.

Publication—Brand New
May Stevens (Pomegranate Communications, Inc., 2005), by Patricia Hills, will be available for purchase in the NMWA Museum Shop.

Organization and Sponsorship
The Water Remembers: Paintings and Works on Paper by May Stevens 1990-2005 is organized by the Springfield Art Museum, Springfield, Missouri, in association with the Mary Ryan Gallery, New York. The exhibition is curated by Peter S. Briggs, Helen DeVitt Jones Curator of Art, Texas Tech Museum of Art. Presentation of this exhibition is made possible by the Members of NMWA. Additional support is provided by the Institute of Museum and Library Sciences.

Admission to the Museum during the run of The Water Remembers: Paintings and Works on Paper by May Stevens 1990-2005 will be $8 for adults, $6 for students and visitors 60 and over, and free for youths 18 and under. Members receive free admission. Free Community Days for the exhibition are the first Wednesday and Sunday of every month.