Dorothy Newkirk Stewart

In eleven days, I will pick up the rental car at our neighborhood Enterprise office to begin the 26 hour drive west to Santa Fe from Winston Salem NC. My emotions have been whirling around, but mostly I’m excited.

Dorothy’s thirty block prints are beautifully framed by my friend Craig at Fourth Street Framing and nestled together in bins to make the journey back where they started one hundred years ago. After being buried at the bottom of a trunk in a dark basement, I think they are eager to be brought into the light and appreciated…the shy little burros, curious sheep grazing in Chamisa grass, and the Navajo riders astride their horses each have something to say.

The greeting cards I had made of five of Dorothy’s original prints look lovely, but they pale in comparison to the broadsheet that my friends at Catbird Press in Tobaccoville created. Using a century old linocut that Dorothy carved in the early 1920s of the historic El Zaguan on Canyon Road and a poem written in her memory,they designed a stunning poster on hand crafted artisanal paper. They are magical.

These limited edition prints will be sold at the gift shop at the Historic Santa Fe Foundation during the exhibition.

Another exciting development, (which I feel certain the Stewart women had a hand in) is an article which will be published in the June edition of Pasatiempo, the magazine of the Santa Fe New Mexican newspaper. I had written the editor in hopes of getting blurb on their editorial page but my letter was forwarded to another editor who liked my story! So in honor of the courageous women who fought for voting rights in 1920- as some of those very freedoms being threatenedthe voices of Dorothy and Margretta will once again be heard in the streets of Santa Fe.

Photo of Terry Schupbach-Gordon feeding paper into the press… amazing that this is how news was originally circulated before our age of instant communication. Each word is composed of individual little lead letters or type, which is then formed into sentences, which are then tightly blocked onto the plate. The roller is coated with ink and the paper is fed into the machine. The height of the type is determined by the thickness of the paper and if it is a millimeter off, the ink doesn’t make a solid contact. As an observer, that’s my uneducated take on the process. But I’m inspired to take a class at Sawtooth this fall!!! It’s an amazing art form.