May Stevens
When the Waters Break
February 20 – April 12, 2025
Opening Reception: Thursday, February 20, 2025, 6:00-8:00 pm

RYAN LEE Gallery is pleased to announce When the Waters Break, an exhibition of five paintings and eleven works on paper by May Stevens (b. 1924 Quincy, MA – d. 2019 Santa Fe, NM), made between 1994 and 2009. These works derive from Stevens’s final body of work and most have not been exhibited in New York for nearly twenty years; some will be exhibited for the first time ever. Rooted in her enduring connection to rivers and oceans, these works depict bodies of water — both real and imagined — that were important to Stevens throughout her life. Stevens often added words to the surface of the water, drawing inspiration from women’s writings including passages from Virginia Woolf and Julia Kristeva.

The title of this exhibition comes from a 2006 lecture Stevens gave at Rutgers University that focused on the creative process, relating the struggle of an artist as she works and the sudden realization that the artwork is complete. Stevens explained, “You realize that this has been a dialogue between you and the living organism that is a work of art. It is beyond you, outside of you. You are its handmaiden, its doula.”

Stevens used a wide array of colors in these works, depicting the swirling and rippling movement of water in blues, greens, grays, and purples and adding text in eye-catching gold and silver to approximate the reflection of light on water. Ruminating on the introspective power of words, these works combine the impact of water and writing as a way to harness and process her grief following the death of her husband, artist Rudolf Baranik, and son, Steven Baranik, as well as celebrating the beauty and fullness of life. These paintings extend to the edges of their unstretched canvas, which Stevens felt gave the work an expansive openness to envelop the viewer into the painting.

The title of This Is Not Landscape (2004) gives us perhaps the clearest instruction on how to interpret this body of work, clarifying that they are not merely what they appear to be on the surface. Inspired by Wallace Stevens’s poem “The Irish Cliffs of Moher,” which examines the relationship between nature and one’s family history, the watery drips of this painting evoke a mystical, abstract space.

In Her Boats (1996), the viewer is placed below the water, gazing up at the golden sunlight from the murky, mysterious depths. Women in boats float on the surface. Stevens said, “I became annoyed with the fact that if you ever wanted to represent a human, you have to use a man. I didn’t see why that had to be the case. So these are women, but they are not specifically to be thought of as women because they are humans, people.”

Among the last prints Stevens created, Into the Night (2009) depicts a solitary boat drifting on the water, where atmospheric color washes blur the boundary between water and sky. Deep greens and rich blues evoke a nighttime scene that, while mysterious, is more promising than ominous. Stevens’s characteristic metallic script shimmers on the water’s surface surrounding the boat, accompanying it into the night.

Some of the text in these works is legible but much of it is asemic writing that cannot be deciphered, adding to the sense of mystery evoked by these paintings and works on paper.

Stevens said, “These words create color, texture, movement, an articulation of the surface of the canvas, making it breathe, giving it life, light, a changing inflection; the possibility of seeing the work differently at different moments; of surprise, of finding new things in it, of more than meets the first encounter, of suggesting depths of feeling and connection. The canvas hangs like tapestry, like cloth; the color flows like water, its paths apparent. Water is life.”

May Stevens (b. 1924 Quincy, MA – d. 2019 Santa Fe, NM) came to prominence during the 1960s for her politically charged Big Daddy paintings and drawings. She was a founding member of Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics (1976), and an original Guerilla Girl following the feminist group’s founding in 1985. “Political activity does not interfere with my work, it feeds it,” Stevens said. “It feeds it because I don’t think of art as this sacred thing that you do in this sacred place that nobody else and no other thing can ever come in. It’s part of the world.”

In 2023, Stevens was the focus of My Mothers, a solo exhibition at the MassArt Art Museum, MA. In 2021, Lucy Lippard and Brandee Caoba co-curated a solo exhibition, May Stevens: Mysteries, Politics, and Seas of Words, at SITE Santa Fe, NM. In 2005, she had an important solo exhibition that traveled from the Springfield Museum of Art, MO; to the Minneapolis Institute of Art, MN; and the National Museum of Women in the Arts, DC. In 1999, Stevens had a major retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, entitled Images of Women Near and Far 1983-1997, the museum’s first exhibition of its kind for a living female artist. Her work has also been included in exhibitions at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, DC (2024); Brooklyn Museum, NY (2023); Blanton Museum of Art, TX (2023); Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, NY (2023); Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, TX (2022); Jewish Museum, NY (2022); Telfair Museums, GA (2022); Museum of Modern Art, NY (2021); Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, PA (2020); Smithsonian American Art Museum, DC (2019); Detroit Institute of Arts, MI (2019); Whitney Museum of American Art, NY (2017); and British Museum, UK (2017), among others.

Stevens’s work is in numerous prominent museum collections, including the British Museum, UK; Brooklyn Museum, NY; deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, MA; Hood Museum of Art, NH; Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; Minneapolis Institute of Fine Arts, MO; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; Museum of Modern Art, NY; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC; New Museum of Contemporary Art, NY; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY, among others.

About RYAN LEE
Celebrating emerging and established artists and estates, RYAN LEE presents innovative and scholarly exhibitions across all spectrums of art practices, including painting, photography, video, sculpture, and performance. The gallery takes chances on a wide variety of boundary-pushing artists; their work consistently transcends political, cultural, material, or technical boundaries. In addition, RYAN LEE has, throughout its history, demonstrated its long-standing interest and dedication to feminist, Black and Asian American, as well as queer narratives in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Founded in 2013 by Mary Ryan and Jeffrey Lee, the gallery is led by partners of different generations and backgrounds with over six decades of combined experiences informing its unique approach.