Daniel Owen Stolpe

Life and work

Dan Stolpe has devoted his entire life to exploring the traditional spiritual and aesthetic culture of Native Americans and bringing that tradition to renewed contemporary expression in dramatic and expressive monotypes, woodcuts, serigraphs, etchings, and paintings. Dan’s work helps bridge the Indian and non-Indian worlds and the false divisions among the human and natural.

As a student in the early 1960s at Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles he met and studied under artist, teacher, and printmaker Don La Viere Turner and art history professor Lennox Tierney. Stolpe learned the art of creating and printing intaglios and woodcuts as an apprentice to Don La Viere Turner. Studying art history under Lennox Tierney has had a lifelong impact on Stolpe's art.

He has lived most of his life in the U.S. except for a few years in Canada and with the Native American Swinomish Tribe on their reservation in the state of Washington. He has resided in Santa Cruz, California since 1975.

Over the span of 20 years, Daniel Stolpe had exhibits internationally, including: Japan, Spain and Oaxaca, Mexico and Mexico City. He worked with master printers, including Raul Soruco and displayed his art at Soruco’s Galeria Gràfica, Oxaca, Mexico from 1994 to 1996.

In 1963 Stolpe and Herb Fox opened Montecito Press in Sierra Madre, California. During this time he printed intaglios, woodcuts and lithographs using a combination press of his own design. Two graduates of Tamarind Printmaking Workshop, in Hollywood, California, Joe Funk and Joe Zerker, heard about Dan's press and came to see it. Those two master printers then created their own business, called Joseph Press in Venice, California, and obtained a press designed and built by Stolpe.

Over time Joe Funk became Stolpe's mentor and friend through working on Stolpe's lithographs. It was with Joe Funk that Stolpe learned the elements and fine art of creating and printing lithographs. The two men became lifelong friends and, in 1979, founded a printmaking studio: Native Images Inc. in Santa Cruz, California.

Stolpe has been associated with artists such as Don LaViere Turner, Leonard Edmondson, Dutch artist Nic Jonk, James Joe, and Ambrose Teasawito. He has contributed his own artwork to many notable publications such as William Everson's "Canticle to the waterbirds", and William Shipley's translations of the Maidu Indian myths named The Creation As The Maidu Told It by Hanc'Ibyjim, collected (from the 1900s) by anthropologist and linguist of Harvard University Roland Dixon in 19 Stolpe has taught many print makers over the years including Herb Fox of Miramac Editions, Massachusetts.

His works are represented in many collections including the Fog Art Museum, the Grunwald Collection at UCLA, the Portland Art Museum, and the Smithsonian Institution. The Special Collection Library of the University of California at Santa Cruz has an endowment and an archive dedicated to the collection of Stolpe's Art.