ABSTRACT
When May Stevens first exhibited her nine-foot Artemisia Gentileschi in 1976, she reportedly told Grace Glueck that she chose her seventeenth-century predecessor 'because it upset him that until recently she was so overshadowed by male painters that he'd never heard of her'. In Stevens's monumental Artemisia Gentileschi, modeling is used, the forms are distinct, and there is 'almost no suggestion of atmosphere', all of which are typical of the artist's style. Stevens has explained that the Latin and Italian texts behind Gentileschi were taken from a large, folded flyer that came from an art gallery. The iconography of Stevens's Artemisia Gentileschi reinforces the idea of the artist as the embodiment of painting. When visualizing her artistic forebear, Stevens did not attempt a literal representation of Gentileschi in the act of painting. May Stevens and Sharon Wybrants were two of the artists who formed the foundational membership of SOHO 20 Gallery, the second artist-run, all- women exhibition space in Manhattan.
