High atop a peak in Los Angeles’s Boyle Heights, the Los Angeles Catholic Worker house could easily be mistaken for a fantastical religious art gallery. The Ammon Hennacy House of Hospitality, named for a peace activist who joined the Catholic Worker movement in Milwaukee in the 1940s, is a colorfully painted Victorian manse.
Guests float in and out, and communal dinner is announced with a shout at 6 p.m. Every available wall has at least two art pieces hanging on it—colorful Corita Kent originals, portraits of Dorothy Day, quotations by Daniel Berrigan, S.J., and vibrant collages, icons and woodcuts tucked in every corner. I am greeted by a 20-year-long veteran of the house who is wearing a shirt stamped with the words “Love Your Enemies.” It is an example of what one internet commenter described as the “wood block print Truth-telling” tradition of Catholic Worker art.
The artist behind that print, Sarah Fuller, arrives soon after me and serves as docent for the walls thick with art and as diplomat to the diverse community practicing what she calls “the art of hospitality.”
Fuller, a printmaker and Catholic Worker artist, lived at the Los Angeles Catholic Worker for five years, from 2015 to 2020. She is one of a diverse school of artists birthed by the house’s spirit of hospitality and prophetic acts of Christian nonviolence. She takes me on a tour of the archives of the Catholic Agitator, the community’s newspaper, to which she began contributing editorial art in 2015. Making our way to the basement, where the papers are stored, we pass a golden toilet pushed askew against the wall. “I made that!” Fuller exclaims. No, not to protest any golden toilets in the White House or Mar-a-Lago, but rather advocating for the right to public access for bathrooms on Skid Row, a longtime cause for this community.
Fuller’s golden bathroom accessory is a far cry from the art that she has slowly become known for, block prints that fill Catholic Worker houses and newspapers from New York to Cincinnati to Portland. And yet a spirit of both cheeky contrariness and a seriously principled point of view could describe much of Fuller’s art as well as the wider tradition of Catholic Worker art.
Art and the Social Order
The Catholic Worker was founded as both a newspaper and a movement in 1933, when Dorothy Day began selling the publication for “a penny a copy” on May Day in New York’s Union Square. “Is it not possible to be radical and not atheist?” Day asked in her inaugural editorial of the newspaper. “Is it not possible to protest, to expose, to complain, to point out abuses and demand reforms without desiring the overthrow of religion?” she added. For 93 years, the movement has been living the answer to her question.
Over time, the name Catholic Worker has evolved to evoke a specific set of images for readers: perhaps Bob Fitch’s famous photograph of Dorothy Day being arrested alongside the striking United Farm Workers in 1973; or Fritz Eichenberg’s ubiquitous woodcut of “The Christ of the Breadlines,” which set a halo around a silhouette in a soup line among the homeless and down-and-out; or even the masthead of the movement’s eponymous publication, where Christ embraces two workers, shaking hands in front of him. These images, Catholic Workers say, can express the heart of the mission of this anarchist Christian movement in one evocative stroke.
“Visual art attracts people’s attention,” Dimitri Kadiev, an artist affiliated with the Catholic Worker, said in a phone call. “They might attack, they might mock you, but they also might be interested in it. Write words on the sign of the posters—it only goes so far—but if you have an interesting image, then they actually study it.”
Kadiev has painted murals at many different Catholic Worker communities: at the Hennacy House in Los Angeles, the Hippie Kitchen on Skid Row in Los Angeles, the Dingman House at the Des Moines Catholic Worker in Iowa (where he did an interpretation of Eichenberg’s “Christ of the Breadlines”), and St. Joseph’s House of Hospitality and Maryhouse in New York City. Our Lady of Guadalupe is a frequent subject of his murals, as is portraying the community at work.
“Visual artists have a unique role in passing down the Gospel from one generation to another,” Kadiev said. “The visual language is one of the first languages of the human intellect,” he added.
Visual language has always been an essential element of Catholic Worker houses of hospitality. Throughout its near century, roughly 300 houses have come and gone. More than 100 of those houses are still open, welcoming the stranger, feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless and reconstructing the social order into something less exploitative and violent and something more just.
“We are working for a Christian social order,” wrote Dorothy Day in the “Aims and Purposes” of the Catholic Worker movement, published in the Catholic Worker in 1940. “This work of ours toward a new heaven and a new earth shows a correlation between the material and the spiritual, and, of course, recognizes the primacy of the spiritual.” Artists, the laborers of beauty, have a privileged role in fostering this correlation between the spiritual and the material.
Since the first Catholic Worker artists filled the pages of the titular newspaper with woodblock prints of the saints performing manual labor or household tasks, art has been an important dimension of the organization’s vision of the reconstruction of the social order. Jim Forest, a longtime Catholic Worker, credited Eichenberg’s haunting art for prompting him to pick up the newspaper and read what it was all about.
Although wood blocks and truth-telling have a privileged place in Catholic Worker art, the art of the Catholic Worker movement includes a panoply of techniques, styles, subjects and philosophies. Murals, watercolors, printmaking and quilting techniques abound.
Catholic Worker artists are of all ages and genders. Willa Bickham, 81, paints watercolors and prints silk screens in Viva House, the home she and her husband, Brendan Walsh, have run for 60 years in West Baltimore. Becky McIntyre creates murals in Philadelphia and art for the cover of the Catholic Agitator.
Further north, in Portland, Emma Coley Fitzgerald creates block print cards, classical iconography and whimsical paintings for her community. Visiting each of these houses, I was able to see how these artists embrace the movement’s incarnational love of the human person and the human artistic and creative genius. The Catholic Worker tradition of philosophy in action inspires them to make art with a deeper pedagogical purpose.
Ade Bethune: Truth-Teller
The tradition of printmaking—woodcut, lithograph, linocut, block-printing—in the name of “truth-telling” originated with the original Catholic Worker artist, Ade (pronounced Ah-day) Bethune. Bethune immigrated with her family to New York from Belgium in 1928, when she was just 14 years old. She heard about the Catholic Worker newspaper from fellow art students at Cooper Union Art School, but she was disappointed in the initial scrubby drawings and the Renaissance paintings that appeared in the fall editions in 1933.
Bethune designed the second masthead for the Catholic Worker paper when she was a 21-year-old art student in 1935. Originally, the masthead of the paper featured two workers on opposite ends of the paper’s title. Bethune was unimpressed by what looked like 1930s versions of clip art. “Had Dorothy obtained the two workers from odds and ends of leftover cuts in an old case at her printer’s?” she wondered.
She set out to surprise Dorothy with a properly designed masthead. “The two workers at opposite ends of the page looked as though they were not on speaking terms, I thought. Somehow or other they must come together and shake hands in solidarity,” Bethune said, planning to bring some unity to a disjointed image.
She brought the Black worker (suggested by Dr. Arthur Falls of the Chicago Catholic Worker) and the white worker together, shaking hands while embraced by Christ before a cross. Bethune hand-carved the distinct lettering for the paper’s title. And thus the masthead remained until 50 years later, when Bethune replaced one of the male workers with a woman who was a “mother and agricultural worker,” as Bethune explained in her editorial to announce the change for the May 1985 edition.
Bethune was deeply influenced by Peter Maurin’s theology of work and wrote a short treatise called, simply, “Work.” From her deeply sacramental vision of work, Bethune became a strong advocate for liturgical art and became part of the liturgical arts movement that mushroomed in the early 20th century. “The liturgical movement asked Catholics to take part in the Mass in a new way,” Katherine Harmon wrote in an article on Bethune’s contributions, “not only as individuals forming their lives in Christ, but as a socially oriented, worshipping body, becoming the Body of Christ.”
Bethune has inspired many Catholic Worker artists, including Sarah Fuller in Los Angeles. Fuller and her partner have toyed with the idea of calling their house Ade Bethune House. Fuller studied Bethune’s work and has, as a treasured image in her studio, Bethune’s print of St. Joseph the Worker.
Fuller has designed logos for several Catholic Worker communities, most recently the new La Sagrada Familia Catholic Worker in New Hampshire. She is driven to create community among Catholic Worker artists, to connect one another, which led her and a fellow Los Angeles Catholic Worker alum, Becky McIntyre, to launch an online newsletter, The Illuminator, to highlight the work of other Catholic Worker artists and profile their work.
In her airy apartment in a low-slung apartment complex on a quiet street in Ventura, Fuller enters the guest room that doubles as her studio. She pulls out Rubbermaid bins of floppy linoleum stamps, carved into shapes of art that populate Catholic Worker houses and newspapers the globe over. The 93rd anniversary edition of The Catholic Worker was filled with prints from Fuller’s “A Catholic Worker Alphabet” collection.
The blocks that Fuller uses to print look like childhood craft stamps. They are made of flexible pink or gray linoleum, into which Fuller carves her designs. Hence the name “linocuts,” which describes many of Fuller’s prints. Fuller begins her designs with an initial sketch or ink drawing, which she then renders on the linoleum block via transfer paper. She uses a carving tool to carve the design following the guidelines on the linoleum.
Fuller has also been inspired by the artist John August Swanson, a friend of the Los Angeles Catholic Worker. Shortly before he died in 2021, Swanson called Fuller up. That day, Fuller was “on the house,” meaning she was practicing the art of hospitality: answering the door, picking up the phone, running through a list of chores. Swanson had seen a series of her artwork in The Catholic Worker’s May anniversary edition. He told her how much he liked her work, Fuller related, and gave her some advice that stuck: “Don’t get too refined,” Swanson said.
Fuller interpreted that as an embrace of the imperfect, the rough and raw. A self-described perfectionist, Fuller has embraced the art of letting a piece go, letting it be done, and living with the rough edges. Once the carving is done, it is done.
One Artist’s Vocation
Catholic Worker art, for Fuller, is all about community. And community has affirmed her vocation to be an artist. As she began experimenting with her artistic practice at a Catholic Worker house, at first it felt too “decadent.” The Los Angeles Catholic Worker’s soup kitchen, the Hippie Kitchen, operates three days a week, and the Workers open the Ammon Hennacy House for community dinner and hospitality throughout the week. The house prioritizes and values hard work, Fuller said, and, at first, creating art did not seem like labor that had enough value or communal benefit. (She is not alone in her perception: the American Academy of Arts and Sciences found in their 2021 report, “Art Is Work,” that only 22 percent of Americans believed that art contributed “a lot” to the good of society.)
But then the London Catholic Worker asked Fuller to create art for their house, including a Madonna and Child featuring Mary at a protest. She moved to London in 2012 and made art for the house that still hangs on the walls. “That’s when I realized art could be a real service to Catholic Worker communities,” Fuller said.
Community has a deeper meaning for how Fuller practices her craft as well. We took a walk through “Monuments,” an exhibit at Los Angeles’s Museum of Contemporary Art, near the Federal Building where Los Angeles Catholic Workers have been arrested protesting ICE enforcement in Los Angeles and the detainment of immigrants in the federal detention center downtown. The gallery featured a few of the nearly 200 Confederate monuments that were decommissioned between 2015 to 2020 in response to public outrage.
Many were oversized Victorian statues depicting Confederate military leaders or figureheads, baroque in scope and now grotesque in appearance, defaced or covered in graffiti. They were juxtaposed with pieces by Black artists, featuring contemporary pietàs of Black mothers and sons, art addressing the cost of slavery and police brutality, and art that celebrated Black American resilience in the form of a film celebrating Mother Emanuel A.M.E.’s choir in Charleston, S.C., which lost nine church members when a white supremacist opened fire on their congregation.
Fuller paused to contemplate bronze ingots that were all that remained of the statue of Robert E. Lee on horseback in Charlottesville, Va. She was struck, she says, by the Confederate statues’ former appearance of permanence. “All that expensive art was used to oppress people,” she said.
In contrast to the ideology of state oppression that fueled those monuments or even the rarified air of exclusivity that fills a fine art gallery, Fuller’s art is designed to be accessible and popular. “Printmaking is something anyone can do,” she said. It can bring whimsy and fun to a community, a reminder to play. Perhaps most important, it creates reproducible art that can be spread widely. Value is derived from widely sharing the image, not from exclusive ownership of the art.
Although I have lived in and visited dozens of Catholic Worker houses, surrounded by Eichenbergs, Fullers and Bethunes, I find myself still hesitant to believe that art is something anyone can do. Creativity seems like something for only the trained. But Bethune would argue creating things is what we are all called to do, by virtue of our human dignity.
“Work is man’s greatest school of life,” she wrote in 1938. “It enriches mankind. It makes life fuller. It makes man more human. He is, in a way, a ‘creator’; he is made in the image and likeness of God, the great Producer.” Fuller’s journey to claim her vocation as an artist, of the gift her personal creativity could be for the collective, resonates. It reminds me of Bethune, re-orienting the view of craft through the lens of the human dignity of being an image and likeness of God. Bethune depicted the saints doing manual labor about the house—because she believed that work was just as worthy as fine art of human time and attention.
Tellingly, the pieces of art Fuller found herself most drawn to was a gallery of curated prints by Hugh Mangum, a white photographer, which he had taken of ordinary people in the Jim Crow South. It was a series that depicted ordinary folks, capturing the dignity of the human spirit, the light in their eyes, in a popular, accessible medium.
Murals: a Marathon
On a bright, crisp Saturday in May, I step off from the Allegheny L train stop into the Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia. Becky McIntyre is installing a mural in a health center just up the block from the train.
When I arrive, the mural is already up—a wallpaper hanger McIntyre met at a previous mural installation helped her do it. It took half the time, McIntyre said, impressed at the craft of the union worker.
A gaggle of McIntyre’s artist friends show up to help—she is paying them, for the worker deserves her wages. She also treats them to Puerto Rican pastries and coffee, and pizza afterward.
McIntyre, 31, met Fuller through the Los Angeles Catholic Worker when McIntyre came to stay for a few months with the community. She was inspired by Fuller’s printmaking to learn the craft herself.
A graduate of St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, McIntyre moved back to the city in December 2020, after spending the pandemic summer of 2020 at the Los Angeles Catholic Worker. She created her first mural, with Kadiev, on the wall of the Hippie Kitchen on Skid Row.
McIntyre has designed nearly 20 murals and worked on teams to create a dozen more. On this sunny Saturday, she is hanging up two more murals in the gym and community center of Esperanza Health Center in Kensington. Children come in and out of the building for fitness classes and shooting hoops in the bright, welcoming gym. Words of encouragement are scattered over the artists’ shoulders as the children admire McIntyre’s work. “Looks real good!” “Keep it up!”
Slowly, McIntyre and her team paint over the seams in the wallpaper on which the mural is printed. This part is more like craft than fine art—there’s a method and an application for someone to apprentice, a skill to learn. Today, I am the apprentice. This is not my discipline, I work with words, but there is an “embodiment” to this sort of creativity, as McIntyre said, that is appealing.
Murals are an important part of Catholic Worker art tradition—Ade Bethune created various murals on the walls of Tivoli Farm in the Hudson River Valley and St. Joseph House in New York City, and other Catholic Worker artists have taken up the practice. To McIntyre, murals—and Catholic Worker art in general—can be an important record of the community. “It helps us to be seen, to see ourselves in the work—it captures us,” she said.
Touching up the mural that Saturday was a corporate, collaborative process. The crew worked steadily for about three hours, carefully applying paint, cooperating and coordinating efforts while consulting McIntyre and the color guides she created for each mural. McIntyre came back a few days later to finalize it. She ended up spending 13 hours at the center on her final day of work. Once she ended her sprint, a two-year process had ended. “It feels great,” McIntyre said with a laugh. “It feels like a weight has lifted,” she said later in a phone call. But although the process took longer than she thought it would, she was grateful for it, she said, grateful that the community “trusted me to capture their community” in her art.
McIntyre created the faces in the murals from photographs of community members. The words running through the paintings were gathered from interviews and a communal discernment process. This was a process of capturing a community in color and shape. The two-year process caused McIntyre to reflect on the ephemerality and fluidity of community: “This is the community at one moment in time.” Already, over the course of the mural’s creation, the community has changed, transformed.
Community is also a form of art-sharing. Willa Bickham, of the Viva House Catholic Worker in Baltimore, sends out her work as a Christmas card. In Catholic Worker houses it is not uncommon to see a watercolor image by Bickham hanging in the odd corner. Before Bickham, the artist Rita Corbin—whose “Works of Mercy/Works of War” is an influential Catholic Worker image—also disseminated her art to fellow Catholic Worker houses through annual mailings of art.
To McIntyre, Catholic Worker art is not just about making a community visible to itself and others; it is about making the philosophy of the movement accessible, graspable. She highlighted Bethune’s first encounter with Dorothy. “Ade’s desire to accompany the words of the newspaper with art,” she said, contains the work of all Catholic Worker artists, to “capture the work of the movement and the values of the movement visually,” she said.
“Theoretically, Catholic Worker art lets people enter into the fluffy theological things and enter into it differently,” McIntyre said, to access abstract ideas concretely. “It invites us into imagining together—to help us see the world we want to live and create,” she added.
Community in Printmaking
On a Wednesday afternoon, before the weekly hospitality dinner, Emma Coley Fitzgerald has gathered her community at Simone Weil House in Portland, Ore., to recreate the yearly tradition of making Easter cards. Fitzgerald was one of the first Workers to join Simone Weil House, which her now-husband, Bert Fitzgerald, founded in 2019.
Sending out artwork in the form of a holiday card is a longstanding Catholic Worker tradition. Willa Bickham, mentioned above, has sent out a Christmas card for most of the 60 years since she co-founded Viva House in Baltimore. Rita Corbin, another longtime Catholic Worker artist, sent out calendars each year at Christmas with her art imprinted on them.
Fitzgerald has updated the tradition to sending out Easter cards. This tradition began as a way to thank donors. She wanted to share something personal, tangible. “It’s like sharing a piece of the house,” she said of the cards. “It doesn’t cost much, but it’s a gift of time, attention and labor.”
“Industrialism produces a lot of ugly things,” Fitzgerald said, and to counter that, the mission of the Catholic Worker is to create beauty. Fitzgerald cites Dorothy’s favorite line of Dostoevsky, “beauty will save the world,” and also Simone Weil’s belief that “the beauty of the world is the mouth of the labyrinth” into the love of God waiting at the center. Although there are no golden toilets, Simone Weil House captures Fuller’s spirit of contrarian play in its “Second World” kiosk, the visual jokes propped around the house. The house also uses crafts and manual labor to raise money by selling card sets of Fitzgerald’s woodblock prints, as Bethune did; the house has also sold beeswax candles they dip in the basement.
Fitzgerald began woodblock carving in high school. She read The Catholic Worker as a teenager and was taken by Bethune’s art of the saints. When she was in high school, Fitzgerald would troll the Bethune digital archives at St. Catherine University in Minnesota and absorb Bethune’s unique style. When she first joined Simone Weil House in Portland, she began creating geometric patterns and block prints of Dorothy Day quotes for cards. Fitzgerald educates me on certain aspects of woodblock or linocut drawings: “Make a shape,” she says, “not a line,” pointing to a nose or an eyebrow that’s too much of a “line.” The shape is more visually interesting, she points out. And: “Keep the chatter to a minimum.” Fitzgerald edits out lines filling the background of her 2026 Easter card, an image of the risen Christ, carving out the “chatter” with a small chisel.
Tattooed on Fitzgerald’s left arm is a quotation from The Long Loneliness, Dorothy Day’s autobiography: “It all happened while we sat there talking,” about the fecund creativity of community. Fitzgerald, 29, has muscular dystrophy, so she depends on community members at her Portland Worker house to run the press for each card: Community is not just a luxury but an essential element of the printmaking process. One of the house’s long-term volunteers, Helia, steers the Woodzilla press, pushing down the lever in rhythmic repetition, carefully pressing the cards onto the ink-covered stamp. Don, one of the house’s longest residents, warns her that she is lining up one card on the stamp backward—but it’s too late. “I thought you were teasing,” Helia responds. “Can I do one?” Don asks. Even critics become creators at the Worker.
Threshold to the Divine
Fitzgerald, like Bethune, is a student of traditional iconography. Bethune’s goddaughter gave Fitzgerald the gift of an icon of Our Lady of Perpetual Help that Bethune created in 1963 for her St. Leo League Shop, named for her patron, St. Leo the Great. Bethune, like Dorothy Day, was inspired by the East and was interested in the theology and technique of traditional iconography. In 2021, Fitzgerald began studying iconography, and it unlocked something important in her practice of art, she said.
Each Tuesday, Fitzgerald teaches classes at the Classical Iconography Institute at Pope Pius X Church in northwest Portland. Iconography, Fitzgerald said, is an act of “subcreation.” The traditional elements of pigments, brushes and canvas combine the animal, vegetable and mineral elements of the world. “It’s a microcosm of the macrocosm,” Fitzgerald said. “We sanctify created things by our labor.”
Fitzgerald was working on an icon of Maria Skobtsova, Mother Maria of Paris, for a gallery of icons of the saints opening at the nearby Benedictine community of Mount Angel Abbey, south of the city. The goal of the icon, Fitzgerald said, is to let the “saint shine through.” The theology of iconography depicts the artist as a channel for the divine image, which is why Eastern Christians reverence the divine image. Fitzgerald describes it as almost a “mystical experience.” After layer upon layer upon layer of paint—sometimes so translucent as to be almost invisible—the image comes alive. “When you work on icons, the icon works on you,” Ania Kocurek Williams, the lead iconography instructor, said.
The icon represents the movement in a nutshell—it is offering a portal into reality rather than recreating it. The icon, as an instantiation of a divine presence, rather than a portrait of one, serves as a theological icon for a house of hospitality. It is a real, tangible presence, she said, sitting in the community’s light-filled, wood-carved arts and crafts dining room, which held a small phalanx of printed cards that later would be swept aside to serve curry to two dozen dinner guests.
The icon is a threshold to a divine presence: an invitation to reverence the holy. And so, to the Catholic Worker, the house of hospitality is also an icon in which to encounter the incarnate God—so, too, is the very guest who sits across from them, sharing a dinner of rice and soup. Artists of hospitality, as Fuller might say, practice the reverence of the iconographer. It is an art that, as you work on it, it works on you.
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