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Creating Community Around Catholic Worker Art
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Welcome to the inaugural edition of The Illuminator, a newsletter
about arts and artists in the Catholic Worker movement!
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Hi! Our names are
Sarah
Fuller and
Becky
McIntyre and we have a number of sources of inspiration for starting this newsletter. First, as folks who have been working as Catholic Worker artists and printmakers for a number
of years (we met while living in the Los Angeles Catholic Worker community in 2019), we are interested in learning more about the history, tradition, and current world of Catholic Worker arts and artists. Also, as people who have participated in the work of
various Catholic Worker communities, we are interested in how the arts and crafts in the Catholic Worker movement link and connect to the service, resistance, and justice projects of communities. We would like to start this newsletter to share information,
build connections and community, encourage artists, and support the aims and means of the Catholic Worker movement.
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Dismantle the System
by Becky McIntyre
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Sarah (left) & Becky (right)
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Works of Mercy
by Sarah Fuller
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We decided to name this newsletter “The Illuminator” for a few reasons. We wanted to convey the idea of bringing light, inspiration, imagination, and clarification, but
it is also a reference to the process of illustrating or adorning a manuscript. From the beginning of the Catholic Worker, when Ade Bethune asked Dorothy Day if she could make illustrations to help improve the look, feel, and message of the Catholic Worker
newspaper, artists have asked or have been asked to participate in the life of the movement. Today, there is a great tradition of art by artists like Ade Bethune, Fritz Eichenberg, and Rita Corbin that is used in the Catholic Worker newspaper, and in the
communications of many other Catholic Worker communities as well. Community houses and buildings are decorated with art by these and other artists. People are making new art for newsletters, protests, vigils, and to beautify spaces and edify and welcome those
who come through those spaces. Art is gifted to houses by supporters, artists, and the many folks who make their way into and out of communities. The Catholic Worker is a movement of ideas and clarification of thought, and it is also a movement of daily,
embodied, practical actions undertaken with a spirit of love. The arts find a place to illuminate - explain, decorate, inspire - these various aspects.
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Dorothy often quoted Dostoyevsky that “the world will be saved by beauty.” She loved music and literature. She viewed artistic activities not as frivolous, but central
to the world she wished to see created, as well as key to its methods of creation. Robert Coles quotes Dorothy on her reflections on art in his introduction to
The Long Loneliness:
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LACW wall covered in art and photographs
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“I get my strength from the way those writers and artists portrayed the poor,
that’s how I’ve kept going all these years: I pray to God and go visit Him in churches; and I have my conversational time with Van Gogh or with Dickens—I mean, I’ll look at a painting reproduced on a postcard, that I use as a bookmark, or I read some of those
underlined pages in one of my old books, and Lord, I’ve got my strength to get through the morning or afternoon!”
-Dorothy Day
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Focusing on Catholic Worker art is not meant to detract from the aims and means of the movement but to uplift and assist them.
We hope to feature the work of Catholic Worker artists old and new, and interview folks involved in the Catholic Worker and the arts. We would love to explore the relationships
between arts, crafts, manual labor, meaningful work, personalism and self-sufficiency. We would like to highlight large and small moments of beauty and artistic creation that people are weaving through the movement, and learn what these activities mean to
the people undertaking them. We hope you enjoy this newsletter, and please be in touch!
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March Featured Artist: Ben Borden
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We recently interviewed Catholic Worker Ben Borden of the Los Angeles Catholic Worker community.
Ben Borden is an artist and teacher who has been working with the Los Angeles Catholic Worker since 2017. He works in the community’s soup kitchen and is one of the cooks, regularly cooking
gallons of delicious legumes for the folks of the Skid Row neighborhood. We asked Ben some questions about his art making practice and how it relates to his Catholic Worker experiences.
Ben works in LA, with a studio in the City of Commerce. He finds that industrial area inspiring, situated in the middle of the center of manufacturing for the country, with “trains from Long
Beach carrying most of the imported goods coming in to North America,” lots of craft and fabrication, the “polar opposite of the idea of ‘glitzy Hollywood LA.’” Ben studied industrial design and is interested in materials, physical and manufacturing processes,
and creating relationships with the craftspeople in the area.
Much of his current art practice involves using industrial techniques to create objects in which metal, chemicals, and algae interact in ways that are unpredictable and change slowly over time.
He considers concepts of stasis and immutability versus fragility and impermanence, control versus unpredictability. He wanted to create “images that weren’t static, paintings that were changing.” The processes that unfold via the chemical reactions work
slowly, so “you could make a gesture, but you wouldn’t see the effect for weeks or months. You have to work on the material’s time scale, outside of a human time scale, and see time in a different way.”
Ben likens growing familiarity with materials and outcomes, balanced with an acceptance of unpredictability, to his experience cooking at the Catholic Worker. “After a
while it’s more intuitive, you know and feel it out and don’t measure anymore, you just go for it.” Of the relationship between his life as an artist and as a Catholic Worker, he says “I wouldn’t feel comfortable making art if I wasn’t doing anything, however
small, for community care or social justice, to do something that feels like an attempt at community.” He appreciates the Catholic Worker’s emphasis on craft and manual labor, connecting with his own understanding of craft not as something done by people
with leisure time, but as people who work with their bodies to manufacture and assemble things for industries, sometimes on a mass scale. He shares that “so much of our environment is facilitated and made by the hand and I like to be connected back to that.”
He also sees a connection to Catholic Worker philosophy and his artmaking process: “If you’re going to believe in a better world, you’re going to have to embrace uncertainty. What’s between
the world you have now and what you’re going to create?”
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021524 by
Ben Borden
(2024)
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030424 by
Ben Borden
(2024)
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011524 by
Ben Borden
(2024)
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Ben’s first solo show, “Bloom,” opens this Friday, March 22, 6pm-9pm, at the Noon Projects gallery in LA:
NOON
Projects
951 Chung King Road
Los Angeles, CA 90012
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Digging Up the Art Archives in the Belly of the NYCW
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Becky with the Strangers & Guests goats
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Part of the inspiration for creating this newsletter also comes from some of the collective art projects we have had the opportunity to do together in the last
year. We have continued to uncover just how important doing community engaged artmaking is to us and our practices. It adds a deeper layer of meaning being able to share our practices and create with others who might not otherwise have the space, exposure,
or motivation. Informed by the communal nature of the CW movement, it makes sense both to share our skills with others and to explore the cloud of witnesses whose art inspires us, so it was really exciting to embark on our most recent adventure together this
past January when we took a 2.5 week art journey to share our printmaking skills as well as uncover some history of the printmaking ancestors of the movement.
Our trip started in Maloy, Iowa where we attended the CW Craft Retreat at the Strangers and Guests Catholic Worker with Betsy Keenan and
Brian Terrell.
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The weekend was full of homemade farm crafts galore, including weaving, spinning, sewing, quilting, nålbinding, candle-making, cheese-making, goat-milking, and, of course, fabric printmaking.
Becky made a colorful rag rug and candles, Sarah wove a dish cloth and quilted her fabric prints together, and we both spent some time in the snow with Brian and Betsy’s 3 sweet goats, Frida, Ruby, and Lilly. It was a delight to connect with other CW crafters
who traveled in from all over the country to hunker down and share and expand our crafts together over tea and all kinds of homemade treats. We were inspired by conversations around the dinner table, sharing stories and exploring the realm of craft and resistance
more deeply and its history within the movement.
Brian felt strongly that this gathering is more than just a retreat; “crafting” is so much deeper than people with leisure time sitting around creating. Craft is not only being resourceful and
using the materials of the Earth around us to create what we need to survive, but also a way of resisting the technocratic world of instant gratification that we live in. It is a form of creating our own entertainment but with things that are useful.
Reflecting on Fritz Eichenberg’s Friday Night Meeting talk, Dorothy shares in her July 1960 column “What is our responsibility? To go back to crafts. A room which has in it a loom, a piece of
clay, a press, some wood for carving and some tools, a pen and paper for calligraphy, a mouth organ, wool to knit with - all these things restore creativeness.” Creativeness not only is useful within the realm of the arts, but it also inspires us to think
outside the box about new ways to relate to each other and imagine beyond our current systems.
The next leg of our journey involved 2 weeks in New York, both at Maryhouse Catholic Worker as well as a tour to a few different colleges and universities in the area, sponsored by the connections
of a friend of the LACW, Eric Martin. We also took a day trip to Connecticut to visit the impressive Dan Berrigan art collection at the Benincasa Community and check out the Amistad Catholic Worker. At Maryhouse we shared about our craft and the art of the
movement at the NYCW’s Friday Night meeting as well as with students, and even did a community mural with Sarah’s “Works of Mercy” piece at Iona University. We shared about our inspirations and experiences within the field of community and participatory art
making.
It was really touching and motivating to see people’s excitement around our art at the Friday Night Meeting at Maryhouse. A few older folks from St. Joseph’s House in NY
who’ve used Sarah’s art in their paper came in super excited about her being a younger person who has continued the art of the movement for 10 years. Students from Fordham came in fangirling over Becky’s synod art, even wearing a t-shirt with her art. Young
and old people alike crowded the room, full of questions and stories to share about their own art practices and histories within the movement.
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The impetus of this journey stemmed from the desire of Joanne Kennedy and Amanda Daloisio from Maryhouse to unearth the many metal plates of artwork by artists in the beginnings
for the movement, tucked away in a big metal case in the Maryhouse basement. Joanne and Amanda came across our work as modern day printmakers of the movement, and invited us to come help make sense of what was there and how to restore and use it. We took a
deep dive into the belly of Maryhouse and by the end of our time counted over 900 plates!
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A few of the 943 plates we found
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The case was full of art by the trinity of Catholic Worker artists - Fritz Eichenberg, Rita Corbin, Ade Bethune - but many other artists who also have contributed their art to the movement since
its beginnings including Fr. Edward Catich, Gary Donatelli, Robert Hodgell, Meinrad Craighead, and others.
The NY Catholic Worker newspaper now adds art to the paper by sending printed paper copy versions of the artists’ work to the printer of the newspaper. All of the prints
are all stored in a filing cabinet bursting with labeled files of the many artists, so the metal plates we sorted through haven’t been touched in years. In addition to counting them, we began sorting, photographing, identifying, and doing some research about
the plates.
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From left to right
Joanne Kennedy, Becky McIntyre, Amanda Daloisio, Sarah Fuller, Iris Vasquez-Howard
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This phase of the project is the information gathering phase. We started and are continuing to do some research on the past processes of type and letterpress to understand
how these plates were made and how to use them properly, as well as get information from older folks in the movement who may have used these plates or who are storing other work of these artists in other archives. The plates are metal plates, many mounted
on wood, that were made from the artist’s original work and sized according to the newspaper’s columns.
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The NY team is continuing to identify the artists of each work (since most plates aren’t labeled in any way) and identify which pieces they don’t have prints of in their collection. We are discussing
ways of how to best print, store, and archive these plates, but also with the hope of how to best share the artwork used in the NYCW newspaper with other houses for their newspapers as well.
Stayed tuned for more updates about the project! If you think you might be helpful in identifying some of the artists of the old plates, or may have other helpful information
about this project, please reach out to Joanne at Maryhouse: kennedy...@gmail.com
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Thanks for reading this first edition of The Illuminator!
We’d love to hear from you!
theillum...@gmail.com
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