Laura Golobish is Assistant Teaching Professor of Art History in the School of Art at Ball State University. They also serve as the Digital Content Coordinator for the Association of Print Scholars, where they connect printmakers, print specialists, and print enthusiasts to some of the latest in print-centric opportunities and news. Their scholarly interests center on the history of print technologies in a variety of settings from archives and commercial galleries to community centers and personal collections. Laura previously worked in collections management at Tamarind Institute, and collaborated on the exhibition The View from Here: Tamarind at Sixty and Beyond (2021) while finishing their dissertation at the University of New Mexico. Building on their dissertation, Laura is currently finishing articles considering how the replication of Scottish landscape in print and digital graphics have been used to support systemic racism in North America since the Eighteenth century.
What was the most recent experience that made you a stronger scholar-teacher?
Students frequently help me reframe the way I look at things. The last time I taught print history—which was the first time I taught it at Ball State—one of the earliest weekly reflection prompts asked the students to consider some of James Lavadour’s lithographs from Crow’s Shadow Institute of the Arts during a museum visit. I didn’t hide or conceal the object identifying information, but more than half of the class wrote about these lithographs as if they were serigraphs because they display a strong duochromatic composition. Many people associate this compositional tool with screen printing through their exposure to Pop Art.
Some of the students were frustrated when they realized the small hiccup in identification. However, the appearance of the print matched a certain idea they’d already had exposure to. They remembered the information and applied it. There will also likely never be catastrophic consequences if you casually mislabel a lithograph. However, that moment gave me the opportunity to learn more about the students, and the ways they’ve internalized history. It also pushed me to start asking more questions about curriculum structure across the department.
That instance also provided some reminders about patience. I spend a lot of time living in the specialist weeds of printmaking and print jargon. It takes time and practice to learn what different processes and inks look like on paper. The matrix is almost never part of the published edition. It can be challenging to contextualize the differences in media if you don’t see the litho stone, screen, or plate sitting in close proximity. There’s even constantly more to learn as digital technologies and 3D printing reshape the boundaries of the discipline. That semester gave me an opportunity to reflect on how much space and time it took to get comfortable working with and talking about prints. I haven’t been teaching very long, but I hope I’m able to give my students the same space that my mentors and professors gifted me with to explore and learn my interests.
What nineteenth-century dessert do you find most tempting?
Last semester a group of students was working with the history of cookbook design and food photography based on some examples from Special Collections at the campus library. The students pulled a book from around 1802 or 1803 that contained a recipe for “An Excellent Raspberry Tart.” I remember nothing about the recipe, but what lover of raspberries would not want “an excellent” tart prepared from them?
In which country and when during the nineteenth century would you like to live if you could go back in time?
Scotland during the 1820s. I’ve been working with a lithographic magazine published by Glaswegian printer John Watson entitled The Glasgow Looking Glass and later retitled The Northern Looking Glass (1825-26). The available workshop records contain some inconsistent information about sales and circulation patterns. I’m not actually fit for labor in a nineteenth-century print workshop preceding the advent of more recent and thorough ventilation technologies, but I’d love to have the opportunity to directly observe the publishing and print market in Glasgow and Scotland more broadly during that decade.
If you could travel to the nineteenth century to change one thing, what would it be?
The November 30, 1872, issue of The Illustrated London News features an image of people crowded in a park around a statue of the author Walter Scott. The Caledonian Club for Scottish residents in New York commissioned Edinburgh sculptor John Steell to produce a copy of his monumental bronze portrait of Scott in honor of the centenary of Scott’s birth. The sculpture was then installed directly across from Steell’s portrait of Robert Burns in the space currently identified as Central Park where both sculptures still exist.
On the occasion of the unveiling, journalists reported that prior to the design and installation of the new landscaping, the space was void of connections to human history and that the esteemed literary personages would build up the memory and sense of tradition in a previously silent land. In a few words, journalists obliterated the the history of the Lenape people along with that of Seneca Village and the violent removal of its Black residents.
If Central Park continued to exist as it does, city planners and officials would have found something else to stamp settler colonial ideas onto, but in a world where Seneca Village was destroyed and not allowed to continue thriving, I think about that statue no longer existing.
Is there anything from the nineteenth century that you wish would come back into fashion?
I’m really enjoying growing access to audiobooks via libraries and also increased general production volume of audiobooks in recent years. Many publishing models still treat the audiobook as an afterthought so there is often a delay between print publication and access to the audio version. As an extension of that, it would be really excellent if we revived the habit of reading aloud to each other for entertainment beyond childhood.