Dorothy Stewart

Dorothy Newkirk Stewart was an American printer, printmaker and artist.

She was born April 8, 1891 in Philadelphia to Dr. William Shaw and Delia Allman Stewart. Her parents sent her and her sister Margretta to private school in Philadelphia.

Stewart started making art in 1925. She studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, her focus being on pantomime, stage design, and fresco painting. In 1921, she traveled to Italy, Greece and France, where she became a student of American School of Fine Arts.

Stewart became well known for her drawing, painting, block prints and linoleum prints. Dorothy signed her prints with the initials, D.N.S.

Dorothy Stewart and her sister Margretta Dietrich settled in Santa Fe, New Mexico in 1925.

In 1936, she was considered one of the members of the WPA Artist Collective in New Mexico. She painted a mural for the entrance of Albuquerque's Little Theatre depicting a clash between Christians and Moors portrayed in New Mexican folk plays.

She acquired a type and printing press from a defunct Spanish language newspaper in Espanola in 1948, and this is when Dorothy started producing vibrant multicolored illustrated books. Stewart was one of the first women to run a private printing press in the Southwest. (Smith, 94)

Of the two sisters, Dorothy more social. She built a studio east of El Zaguán that doubled as Galeria Mexico, where the artist hosted concerts, lectures, shadow puppets plays, and exhibitions representing her wide range of interest. (Smith, 96) El Zaguán still retains an artist residency program with exhibits at El Zaguán under the Historic Santa Fe Foundation.

In the winter of 1955, with a grave medical condition, Stewart was accompanied by her dear friend Maria Chabot to Oaxaca, Mexico where Dorothy was quoted as saying, “If I have to be sick, I would rather be sick here where I hear the street sounds of Mexico.” As Dorothy's condition worsened, Chabot moved her to the American British Cowdry Hospital in Mexico City, where Stewart died of a brain hemorrhage on December 24, 1955.

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