Big Daddy in shorts, silkscreen on paper, Ho Chi Minh Fine Arts Museum collection, (year of production unknown).

May Stevens, (1924- ) is an American artist who has been committed to political artwork for her entire career. She was an important figure in the feminist movement in New York and is rumored to be an original member of the “Guerilla Girls,” an anonymous artists’ group formed in the 1985 that uses posters and public appearances to denounce the male-dominated art establishment. She is also a poet, and was a founder of the influential feminist journal Heresies.

Her paintings, drawings and prints most often address issues related to peace and human rights. This includes her artists' book Ordinary/Extraordinary, which followed the history of the activist Rosa Luxemburg the Marxist revolutionary and pacifist, who was slain by the German military in 1919. The other history illustrated in the book was that of Stevens mother, who had no fame or notoriety but whom the artist nevertheless depicted as an emblematic figure.

Steven’s Pop Art-like print, “Big Daddy”, is included in Liberation. It is from a series of works produced between 1967 and 1976 that caricatures sexism, racism, and militarism in American society. The Steven’s work was discovered to be in the permanent collection of the Ho Chi Minh City Museum of Fine Arts.
(FO)