In early May, on National Cartoonists Day (Herald, May 4), we wrote about the long American tradition of editorial cartooning – and about Judith Reynolds, who has carried that tradition locally for The Durango Herald since Morley Ballantine gave her the job in 1995. This weekend, that thread ties to a bigger one: the country’s 250th birthday, and the First Amendment protections that have made both possible.
That tradition predates the amendment itself. Benjamin Franklin drew a snake in pieces in 1754, decades before the Bill of Rights existed. Ratified in 1791, the First Amendment now bars government from censoring or punishing citizens and the press for what they publish – opinions, criticisms, drawings included. It’s the same protection that lets Reynolds draw Mortie the cat eyeing City Council with open suspicion in 2026. Two hundred-fifty years on, the country is still arguing with itself in public, in print and online. That argument is the point.
Reynolds – billed in the exhibit’s own materials as the oldest living political cartoonist in Colorado – marks 30 years on the job Friday with “30 Years of Durango Toons,” opening at the Durango Creative District gallery as part of First Fridays and, fittingly, Independence Day weekend.
The show almost didn't happen this year. Early in 2026, Board Chair Richard Ballantine and Reynolds realized the actual 30th anniversary had quietly passed without notice. Something, they decided, should still be done. Kathryn Waggener and Jared Reed at the Durango Creative District moved quickly to make it happen, landing a July slot that doubles as a marker for the nation’s semiquincentennial.
Reynolds, who left academia for journalism at 50, has said she wishes she’d made the leap sooner. Talking with us by phone this week, she put it simply: Journalism keeps you connected, current, always on a learning curve – “in the village in which we live” (no dangling prepositions for Reynolds). For a self-described lifelong learner, that’s the real payoff – not just the drawing, but the observation, the questioning, the staying in step with the place she calls home.
What visitors will find isn’t a simple greatest-hits wall. Reynolds works by interrogating the news for alternatives, asking “what if?” before settling on a final take, then rendering it to meet deadline. The show draws a selection from her career body of roughly 850 cartoons, alongside caricatures, Colorado Press Association awards and, for the curious, pieces from her private archive of Trump-era drawings. Mortie, her mascot and alter ego, appears throughout – based on a real, long-departed pet, he still comments on the absurdities and affections of small-town life.
Look, too, for the self-caricature Reynolds has said she plans to use for her own obituary someday – a piece she first described in a 2023 Herald Q&A marking her Extraordinary Woman Award from the Women’s Resource Center of La Plata County (Herald, April 4, 2023). It’s a fitting companion to a retrospective: the artist turning her pen on herself the way she’s turned it on the rest of us for 30 years.
Reynolds isn’t done teaching, either. She’ll give an artist talk at 5:30 p.m. July 23 at the gallery – her first as a PowerPoint presentation – tracing the broader history of political cartooning, building on Life-Long Learning lectures she’s given through Fort Lewis College for more than two decades, with titles like “Iconoclasts and Outsiders,” “The Emperor’s New Clothes” and “Speak, Muse: The Seven Deadly Sins and the Art of Political Cartooning.”
The exhibition, on display through July 31, is made possible by the Durango Creative District and the Center of Southwest Studies at FLC – where archivist Nik Kendziorski maintains the Judith Reynolds Durango Herald Collection. Both deserve thanks for preserving and presenting three decades of a small newspaper’s visual record of itself.
We encourage readers to stop by the opening reception, 5 to 8 p.m. Friday at 1135 Main Ave., as part of First Fridays. It’s a chance to see three decades of this town’s arguments, anxieties and absurdities rendered in pencil, ink and watercolor – and to thank the woman who’s been drawing them.
