[1] Precedent dictated that the Prix de Rome fellows would spend time in Greece studying the classical sculpture there, but Stevens instead decided to go to Egypt.
It was in Southern California that he first met Millard Sheets, already an established artist and founding professor of the fine arts program at Scripps College.
[1] Stevens' sculpture "Monument to the Young Farmers of the Nation" (1938) currently stands at the entrance to the Millard Sheets Center for the Arts in Los Angeles, California.
[3] Sheets later persuaded Stevens to loan his 1931 piece "Doors of Life" to the college for the new Florence Rand Lang art building, now the Elizabeth Hubert Malott Commons, built in 1939.
He modeled and sculpted in clay, plaster, bronze and marble everything from the animals and workers of the ranches to the champion bronco riders he saw at local rodeos.
[1] He created three monumental allegorical figures, "Tenor", "Contralto", and "Texas", along with a representation of the chimera-like nonsense creature of Texan folklore, the "Woofus".
After this commission, Stevens began to sculpt large allegorical figures such as "America" (1941), "American Sculptor" (1941), and "The Confederacy" (1941) as part of his canon in addition to his original cowboys and animals.