ABSTRACT
This chapter explains the author's analysis to look into the life and art of May Stevens, an American working-class artist, feminist and committed political activist. The discussion draws on a French philosopher Jacques Ranciere's analyses of the politics of aesthetics and particularly his notion of the distribution of the sensible and will unfold in three sections. She particularly interested in how Stevens's artwork is inextricably interwoven with her politics, constituting as she will argue an assemblage of artpolitics. It is thus in this artpolitics assemblage that she have mapped Stevens's early work, Freedom Riders and the Big Daddy Series, two phases in her work, which expressed her involvement in the civil rights movement and the anti-Vietnam war protests, but they were also autobiographically driven. She will come back to the Arendtian elements of Stevens's work later on in the discussion of the Ordinary Extraordinary series.
