Vendors

Wilhelmina (Mina) Schutz Pulsifer

This modernist Depression-era lithograph was done by San Diego, California printmaker Mina Pulsifer around 1940. The artist worked with L.A. Master Printer Lynton Kistler to print the stone in an unstated edition. Kistler's blind-stamp is impressed into the lower left margin. Pulsifer signed this impression later in her life.

In the 1940s, Mina Pulsifer turned her attention to printmaking, particularly lithography, and began to receive recognition in that field. The Associated American Artists of New York published two of her lithographs, giving her work wide exposure. Her lithographs were also included in two European traveling shows organized by the Boston Public Library. Pulsifer 's work is in the collections of the Boston Public Library, Bibliotheque Nationale, and National Bezalel Museum in Israel.

These adolescent boys are newspaper vendors who "hawked" their papers often with vocal announcements of the headlines to people on the streets or boarding trains and other modes of transportation. Vendors did not have fixed spots on the street nor did they deliver papers on bicycles.

These vendors or hawkers were prevalent when there were numerous daily papers. Vendors were primarily young boys working their first jobs and they only sold one newspaper, so it was common for vendors of different papers to gather on street corners.