to the academic tradition of history painting but Stevens 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 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. 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, who along with Stevens were among the founders of the Heresies Collective, which also, from 1977 to 1983, published the journal "Heresies: A feminist publication on arts and politics." Mysteries and Politics (1978), is reminiscent of a sacred conversation, in this case between thirteen women who influenced Stevens in their efforts to integrate their feminist politics, creativity, and family life. Ordinary/Extraordinary 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 and social activist, 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. Specifically, she wanted to "erode the polarized notion that one woman's life was special and the other forgettable." The figures had appeared together in two previous works, a collage originally published in Heresies, and in the painting Mysteries and Politics, discussed above. The works in this series are large and powerful. 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 good night." Alice alone is the subject of the monumental five-paneled Alice in the Garden, where she holds a bunch of dandelions, which Stevens' describes having thrown at her when she visited her mother at the nursing home where she spent her last years. Later works: Sea of Words, Bodies of Water Water was an important element of Stevens last two series, Sea of Words (begun in 1990), and Rivers and Other Bodies of