May Stevens (June 9, 1924 – December 9, 2019) was an American feminist artist, political activist, educator, and writer. Early life and education May Stevens was born in Boston to working-class parents, Alice Dick Stevens and Ralph Stanley Stevens, and grew up in Quincy, Massachusetts. She had one brother, Stacey Dick Stevens, who died of pneumonia at the age of fifteen. By Stevens's account, her father expressed his racism at home but "never said these things publicly, nor did he act on them—to my knowledge. But he said them over and over." Stevens earned a B.F.A. at the Massachusetts College of Art (1946), and studied at the Académie Julian in Paris (1948) and Art Students League in New York City (1948). She was granted an MFA equivalency by the New York City Board of Education in 1960 and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College in 1988–89. In 1948 she married Rudolf Baranik (1920-1998), with whom she had one child. Activism Stevens was a founding member of the feminist group the Guerrilla Girls. Work Over the course of her career, Stevens tended to work in series. Her body of work divides into several periods, each characterized by a particular theme or concern. She said that she "start[s] with an idea and I always have more to say about it." While her political commitment drove her earlier work, her later works tend to be lyrical. Freedom Riders The first series influenced by her political awareness is a group of paintings called Freedom Riders exhibited in 1963 at the Roko Gallery in New York. At her husband's request Martin Luther King, Jr. agreed to sign his name to the catalog's forward, in which the Freedom Riders' actions were praised as deserving mention in song and painting. These are the first works by Stevens in which her political awareness influenced the subject of her paintings. Based on the Freedom Riders, civil rights activists who challenged segregation in the South through riding segregated buses and registering voters, Freedom Riders, a haunting black and white lithograph of individual portraits, was also the title of a work in this exhibition. Although Stevens did not participate in their activities she strongly supported the Civil rights movement, and had taken part in protests in Washington, DC. In another work in the exhibition, Honor Roll (1963),the names of James Meredith, Harvey Gantt, and five other