Catholic Worker Artists Celebrated in New CW Publication

Cover photo: Becky McIntyre in front of one of her murals.

“So, there we were in the basement,” Sarah Fuller said when I asked her how her newsletter began. Fuller is one of the artists behind the new Catholic Worker newsletter The Illuminator.

Fuller, an artist from Mennonite and Catholic Worker traditions was in the “basement” (it’s actually not the basement, just the room through the clothing closet, she clarified) of Maryhouse at the New York Catholic Worker, surrounded by 943 metal plates. These thin metal plates—stored in metal cabinets and cardboard boxes—contained copies of art that had decorated the pages of The Catholic Worker for over 90 years.

Fuller was in the non-basement of Maryhouse with Becky McIntyre, a fellow alumna of the Los Angeles Catholic Worker community and a fellow artist. That week, McIntyre was also Fuller’s fellow pilgrim on an artistic journey that began at the Catholic Worker Craft Retreat hosted at Strangers and Guests Catholic Worker Farm in Maloy, Iowa.

After spending a weekend with Betsy Keenan, Brian Terrell, and many other Catholic Worker artisans at the farm, weaving, quilting, and enjoying Iowa winter, they hit the road out East.

They spent the next week in the Maryhouse “basement” taking photographs of each of the 943 metal plates and trying to begin the process of identifying the art and artist. Many of them were by “the big three”—as Fuller called Ade Bethune, Fritz Eichenberg, and Rita Corbin—and others were authored by artists familiar to long-time readers of the paper: Gary Donatelli and Meinrad Craighead, among others.

These metal plates were not the original blocks. And they aren’t used currently for printing the newspaper. But they were used from the 1930s to the 1970s to transfer the original art piece to a metal block that was compatible with the newspaper printing mechanism. It was a part of the process of turning a piece of art into newsprint.

At the end of that week, at Maryhouse’s Friday night meeting on January 26, Fuller and McIntyre gave a short talk on their own work as Catholic Worker artists and community-based artists. They were delighted to find many friendly faces there—some attendees even showed up wearing t-shirts printed with McIntyre’s art.

At that meeting, the artists displayed some of the metal plates that they had uncovered in the basement–and they learned a few things. One of the attendees at the meeting had produced the art on a plate whose artist hadn’t been identified. The artist pulled the same image from her portfolio that was featured on the metal plate, Fuller said.

During this artistic road trip, the idea of a newsletter started percolating in McIntyre and Fuller’s conversations.

Click on images for lightbox.

“It’s a pretty serious movement about serious issues,” Fuller said, “but it’s also about beauty. So, we thought it’d be fun to make connections through that while we’re dealing with all the rest of it.”

McIntyre felt similarly. “We thought it’d be really cool to build community among artists specifically in the Catholic Worker,” McIntyre said. “There are so many folks who fly under the radar.” Part of the goal of their newsletter, she said, is to “uplift the cloud of witnesses” who have contributed to the Catholic Worker’s rich artistic tradition.

McIntyre, who spent time at the Los Angeles Catholic Worker from 2019-2020 and whose art regularly decorates the cover of The Agitator, the community newspaper, now lives and works in the Philadelphia area. She has worked with the Philadelphia church in making community art for the Synod on Synodality.

McIntyre said that she and Fuller have both found fulfillment in their identity as community artists, rather than simply making art for their personal fulfillment or enjoyment.

“We make art in the context of a community,” McIntyre said. “Making art in a community of other people and for community.”

By the Maryhouse Friday Night Meeting in January, they had already decided they would collect email addresses. They gathered 50 subscribers by the time they launched their first issue this past Wednesday.

They are hoping to share more about their New York project to identify artists and share the artwork from the basement.

The first issue features an interview with their fellow Catholic Worker artist Ben Borden, a visual artist who volunteers at the Los Angeles Catholic Worker. And they share a bit of the journey that led them to New York: their road trip from Maloy to Maryhouse.

And, of course, there is a short editorial on the reason for their name, The Illuminator– primarily, McIntyre said, because the arts illuminate and inspire and offer space for imagination. It is a name that honors an artistic practice of the past–a craft that technology has made obsolete: illuminating manuscripts. Also, because of the tradition of arts in the The Catholic Worker newspaper serve to illuminate the words inside.

“The newspapers aren’t just words, but the art plays with the words and they uplift each other,” McIntyre said. “You need imagery to capture people and draw them in.”

Fuller is in Los Angeles and McIntyre is in Philadelphia, but they found a way to celebrate bi-coastally with their first edition on Wednesday. “We’re going to get ice cream at the same time, to celebrate the newsletter after it launches,” Fuller said.

Interested readers can email Sarah Fuller and Becky McIntyre to share your own experience of art and the Catholic Worker or a current art project you are engaged in at: theilluminatorcw@gmail.com.

Subscribe to The Illuminator here. Check out Sarah Fuller’s art here: Sarah Fuller Art. And check out Becky McIntyre’s art here: sanaartista

Read the first issue here: