Water (begun in 2001). 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). Throughout her life water was special and evocative to her - she has written of the experience of swimming as a child and also the poem "Standing in A River" as an adult, in which she describes minnows swimming around her legs. The water is also a way of expressing grief for her lost loved ones, whose ashes she scattered in rivers, her son, her mother, and her husband. Exhibitions and recognition In 1999, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, had a major retrospective of her work, entitled Images of Women Near and Far 1983-1997, the museum's first exhibition for a living female artist. One of Stevens' Freedom Riders series was selected to illustrate the 1961 Freedom Riders in a 2005 panel of United States postage stamps called, "To Form a More Perfect Union." The panel of 37 cent stamps commemorated ten major milestones of the Civil Rights Movement with artwork from different artists. Her solo exhibition in 2006 at the Minneapolis Institute of Art traveled to Springfield Museum of Art, MO and National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC. Stevens’ work is in numerous museum collections, including the British Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, the Cleveland Museum, The Fogg Art Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The Museum of Modern Art, NY, National Academy of Design, NY, National Museum of Women in the Arts, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Whitney Museum of American Art. Stevens' work was included in the 2022 exhibition Women Painting Women at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. References Selected bibliography Alloway, Lawrence. May Stevens. Catalog for Big Daddy Series. New York: Herbert F Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, 1973. Braff, Phyllis. “The Feminine Image in Its Many Facets in the 20th Century.” New York Times, April 6, 1997. Chadwick, Whitney. Women, Art and Society. London: Thames and Hudson, 1991. Glueck, Grace. “May Stevens ‘Rivers and Other Bodies of Water’”.