Judith Deim (birth name Barbara Stevenson) Modernist painter and muralist Barbara Stevenson was born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1911, into a large family of artists and musicians. Judith was a gifted violinist as a child. She also sketched along the banks of the Mississippi River, attaining a kinship with the American South that often surfaced in her artistic vision. Barbara studied art from 1929-1933 at the St. Louis School of Fine Arts on a Macmillan Scholarship. There see met her future husband, painter Ellwood Graham. Graduating in the middle of the Depression era, she earned mural commissions from the Federal Arts Project at the Treasury Department and for a Veterans Hospital in Washington, D.C, the Ventura Post Office, and the Salinas Children's Hospital. While in California she married her former art school classmate Ellwood Graham, and they settled in Monterey. The couple was quickly embraced by a circle of artist friends including writer John Steinbeck, photographer Edward Weston, ocean scientist Ed Ricketts, philosopher Joseph Campbell, painter James Fitzgerald, and musician John Cage. In 1941 Barbara painted the famous portrait of Steinbeck writing the first draft of his book The Sea of Cortez. Subsequently, Steinbeck provided funds to Barbara and her husband for a painting trip to Taxco and Patzcuaro, Mexico. In the 1940s Barbara joined the Carmel Art Association and began studying California modernism with Bay Area “Society of Six”—and CAA—member August Gay (1890-1948). Barbara found mid-century acclaim as a California Modernist. She began employing bold, bright colors outlined with wide dark lines in her landscapes, still lifes, and figurative works. In 1948 Barbara was invited to submit a painting for the most important San Francisco art event of the year at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. For context, fellow artists who were also selected to exhibit included Bay Area Figurative artists Richard Diebenkorn, Frank Lobdell, David Park, Elmer Bischoff, and Hassel Smith, as well as Samuel Francis and Victor Di Gesu, who were both also CAA Artist Members. Barbara then moved to Santa Fe, which led to her first New York solo show in Manhattan. She earned high praise from New York Times critics, who described her work as “vigorous” and identified her as “a new and promising talent.” Exhibitions followed at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Palace of the Legion of Honor, Museum of New Mexico, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, and Carmel Art Association, where she was the very first juried artist member to be accorded a solo exhibition in 1946. From the late 1940s onward, Stevenson took on the name Judith Deim and began signing most of her works under this pseudonym. Separating from Graham in the mid-1950s, Judith Deim left California and moved with their four children to Europe. She continued traveling solo for the next twenty years—an odyssey of painting and exhibiting throughout Europe—where she derived great inspiration from the Roma and flamenco cultures of Spain as well as Northern and West Africa traditions and motifs. From 1977 until her death, she maintained studios in Monterey, San Francisco, Mendocino, and Guatemala. Her work was featured at numerous galleries and museums in Los Angeles, Madrid, Amsterdam, Tangier, Dakar, San Miguel de Allende, Santa Fe, and in Carmel-by-the-Sea, where CAA installed a 50-year retrospective for Diem in 1996. One reviewer wrote, “Deim’s paintings border on the magical realism style. They breathe with figures and animals captured in the adventure of a moment that is at once carnal and mythical.” By this time Deim had already made her home in a tiny, rural, indigenous Mexican village in the mountainous state of Michoacán, where she painted for the final twenty-five years of her life. The award-winning, feature-length documentary Ghost Bird: The Life and Art of Judith Deim was filmed there, prior to her peaceful passing on August 2, 2006.