Olivia Piepmeier

Newsies Set Stamp

← Art / Mixed Media

Looking down at a table with the carved two blocks vertically placed. The blocks have been used for printing, so the words (which are backwards and very hard to read) are stained in black while the grey of the blocks themselves shine through in the carved out parts. There are feet at the base of the photo, under the table, for scale.
A test print on thin, beige paper of the first block. It's sitting on top of other pages on a wooden bench with a ink breyer on a blank space above. It says "NEWSIES CHANGE THE WORLD!" with a line under at the top. Under it says "The striking newsboys wound up a day of hard campaigning in their fight with a meeting last night. It was a remarkable gathering in New Irving Hall. A citizen unused to the ways of the New York newsboy might"
A big rectangular canvas laying on it's side in the grass with other set building stuff beyond it. The photo is turned at a weird angle so one can see the words that were printed. It is the first block over and over leaving a lot of white space under them and some in between. Look at the previous image for the full text - it's a lot!
A part of the set for Newsies - panels with different angles are lined up. They are painted in various ways to appear as bricks and blocks of buildings. There is paper strewn across with the printing from the blocks on it and there's printing from parts of the blocks all over the panels in slightly different colors. The big canvas is to the right with blue lights behind. There are actual newspapers piled up around.

I carved 2, 12x18” Soft-Kut printing blocks into a few lines from an (slightly-reworded for the use-case) article from the July 25, 1899 issue of The Sun about the actual Newsboy Strike.

This was used as a tool to decorate the set of Newsies for BarnArts Summer Youth Theater’s 2023 production that was created under the artistic direction of my colleague, Linda Treash, to match her set design vision. I did some of the actual printing (seen in images 2 and 3) completed with the help of some students. Image 4 shows the final set.