Untitled

Artist, feminist and political activist May Stevens is best known for her notorious satires. But in recent years, she has focused on evocative landscapes and seascapes featuring text fragments from the writings of women authors she admires, such as Virginia Woolf and feminist theorist Julia Kristeva. These words and phrases are generally indecipherable, intended to evoke feelings and meanings through universal associations. This untitled drawing is related to a series of the artist's paintings known as Sea of Words (1990-91). They reveal the mysterious but active presence of women in small boats gliding across spacious verbal oceans. Stevens described the elements of these paintings as Language into visual form, poetry in the ambiguity of shapes, women as signifiers of human agency moving across space and time, propelled by the whisper and cry of lost voices.