May Stevens
1924–2019
Painter, poet, and political activist May Stevens imbues her work with a sociopolitical consciousness. In the wake of the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War, Stevens developed a symbolic figure that would feature prominently in much of her work of the late 1960s and early 1970s: Big Daddy. According to Stevens, Big Daddy is modeled after her father, “who represented to me an authoritarian and closed attitude . . . towards culture, towards politics, towards Black people and towards Jews. He was a person who had stopped thinking when he was twenty and hadn’t opened his mind to anything since.”
Big Daddy Paper Doll features the outline of a naked, bespectacled, and mustachioed man holding a bulldog in his lap. Exuding a sexual and militarized dominance, his head appears bullet-shaped and phallic. His wrinkly features echo those of his canine companion, a visual allusion implying bestial alpha-male instincts. Stevens presents him as a mere paper doll with four potential guises—a masked executioner, an army sergeant, a policeman, and a butcher with a bloodstained apron, each one a manifestation of violence and power. Presenting these roles as interchangeable costumes hints that the same white patriarchal spirit runs through a wide range of American institutions. The representation of Big Daddy as a paper doll, a widely available commercial product, also ties the painting’s style and content to Pop art, and asks the viewer to consider how authoritarian mindsets are being packaged and sold to the American public.
Introduction
May Stevens (June 9, 1924 – December 9, 2019) was an American feminist artist, political activist, educator, and writer.
Wikidata identifier
Q6796587
Information from Wikipedia, made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License . Accessed May 9, 2025.
Introduction
Stevens was active in the feminist art movement, most prominently in the 1970s and 1980s, and is known best for her "Big Daddy" series that were made as a comment on the war in Vietnam.
Country of birth
United States
Roles
Artist, activist, feminist, painter, poet, teacher
ULAN identifier
500005241
Names
May Stevens
Information from the Getty Research Institute's Union List of Artist Names ® (ULAN), made available under the ODC Attribution License. Accessed May 9, 2025.
