"Fed up with rising national debt, Stephen Barnwell decided to bail out America last week .... Part tongue in cheek and part sounding bells to alert lawmakers to what Barnwell believes is a perilous amount of debt, the dollars are part of a growing movement of using art for activism."
Congress.org, July 21, 2010
  "Barnwell doesn’t see money art as about money, itself. Instead, he sees it as a way to appropriate power by stealing the language of power. He sees it as a language by which to criticize the social systems surrounding the icons."
review, March 17, 2010
  "[Barnwell's] political graphics are truly stunning.
They are important additions to this unique archive."
Carol A. Wells, Executive Director
Center for the Study of Political Graphics, Los Angeles, CA
  "One of the most involved and highest quality works here is Stephen Barnwell's American Excess."
Falls Church News-Press, May 20, 2009
  "Barnwell succeeds in forcing viewers to consider what the dollar says about the U.S...."
Time Out Chicago, January 8, 2009
  "Stephen Barnwell's work with money functions as social critique and utopian fantasy....it mocks the value it portrays."
Keith Miller, Curator, Moving Money
  "Gallery visitors will be able to purchase copies of Stephen Barnwell's digital print 'American Excess,' a pseudo stock bond note that'll cause many second looks."
artscope, July/August 2008
  “If you've ever known an acid freak who likes to spend hours mumbling about the Illuminatus symbolism on the back of a dollar bill, hand him a Dream Dollar sometime: he'll claw off his own face.”
WIRED, May 8, 2007
 

"For a number of artists this tension between money's aesthetic and economic functions has been a source of inspiration. Stephen Barnwell has created currency for the fictional land of Nadiria, as well as a history that explains how this lost colony of Antarctica was founded in 1866 and survived for thirty-three years until it mysteriously vanished...."

Hippo Eats Dwarf
by Alex Boese, Harcourt, 2006
  "...it's very agreeable to hold a fistful of Dream Dollars ... and imagine
the kind of economy where such exquisite-looking currency was
coin of the realm."
Seattle Times, December 12, 2005
  "In the decades to come, some artists ... manufactured their own notes or even their own monetary unit. To name just a few: Stephen Barnwell makes poetic Dream Dollars, which are the currency of an imaginary colony in Antarctica called Nadiria...."

Imaginary Economics
by Olav Velthuis, NAi Publishers, 2005
  Once upon a never time
By Marin Marian Balasa
Published in Saptamana Financiara
Bucharest, Romania, 5 December 2005
  "Exceptionally beautiful currency"
The New York Times, July 15, 2005
  "...check out its amazing currency"
Dream-Dollars.com is Cool site of the Week
April, 2004
  "No MoneyART collection is complete without ANTARCTICA Dream-Dollars!"
jsg boggs - 2002