Patricia Hills’s illustrated, intimate conversation with May Stevens gives us an in-depth look at an extraordinary artist, poet, teacher, and activist.  Born in 1924 in the Boston suburb of Dorchester, Stevens studies art in Boston, New York, and Paris.  Today her major paintings are in many prestigious collections, including those of the Brooklyn Museum; the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC.

Through Hills’s “Conversation,” we learn about Stevens’s childhood and her parents (her mother, Alice, is the subject of many of her paintings), her long and close marriage to artist Rudolf Baranik, and her recent work and life in New Mexico.  She explains the impetus behind her emergence as a committed political activist and artist focused on peace, human rights, and feminist.