The University of Dallas is one of only 43 colleges nationwide offering a printmaking degree, and UD should be proud that Professor Laura Post stands at the helm of its printmaking department.
Originally from Philadelphia, Post has zigzagged all over the country in her study and mastery of printmaking, with traditional Chinese woodblock prints as her particular interest.
She fell in love with printmaking during her undergraduate years at Swarthmore College, a private liberal arts school in Pennsylvania, when a happy scheduling accident prevented her from taking a painting class instead. She loved print so much that she studied it abroad in China and Taiwan multiple times before graduating. Post was overjoyed to realize that “the smallness of liberal arts colleges opens up doors,” and that “you can study ART in another place too, not just history or literature!”
After graduation, she worked at galleries in New York City and Provincetown, Mass., coming away with the knowledge that “there’s always something you can learn from a job, even if that’s ‘this isn’t the environment I want to work in’.”
After three years working at a museum in Boulder, Colorado, she realized she wanted to be an artist. Post said, “I basically figured out that I would be horrible at waiting tables,” so she used her arsenal of administrative skills to earn money while building her portfolio for graduate school.
She applied to and got accepted by the Rhode Island School of Design, saying, “RISD is really prestigious and ranked #1 for printmaking, but that wasn’t the reason I wanted to go there.” Several of Post’s advisors and mentors from RISD shared her love for Chinese woodblocks, and this compelled her to take the opportunity. She recommends that prospective grad students “research the professors and what their interests are” when deciding where to apply.
Post came to UD three years ago after teaching in Indiana during the pandemic. She and her husband (an art history professor at UT Arlington) experienced what she calls the “two-body problem” —the near impossibility of two people having tenure track positions in the same area —so they are now “living the dream.” She appreciates the dedication and interest of her UD students.
At home, she loves to spend her time baking, hiking, exploring local nature hotspots like Lake Mineral Wells State Park and building Magnatiles with her toddler son. She works constantly on new independent projects.
In her artistic work, she especially enjoys exploring how portraits in print can express more than traditional portraits. Her current project is constructing three-dimensional casts using paper from invasive plants!
Post says she loves printmaking because “it’s a different way of thinking” about materials and processes; “you have to do a thing to then get a thing, and there’s all this stuff you can do in that [in-between] step, and it forces you to think in a different way that can then generate new ideas.”
Now that the art of printmaking is no longer the primary method of communicating and storing information, she says, “printmaking is ‘freed’ from that role the same way painting was freed by photography.” In other words, 21st-century print artists are blessed with the ability to create expressive fine art, rather than art primarily meant to pass along information.
I have loved learning about printmaking from Professor Post this semester, and I highly recommend that if print intrigues you even slightly, you should take a class with Post this spring! She is a self-described “whirlwind” in class, and a wonderful artist to boot. You can see her work on her website at www.laurarpost.com.