Where art meets engineering: Interdisciplinary collaboration helps revive printing presses

Thomas “Joey” Boyle has been a technician at the Russ College for 11 years and has worked in tandem with the College of Fine Arts for many of those years. His involvement began with a request from Don Adleta, a current emeritus professor and the founder of the School of Art + Design’s typeshop.

“There was a piece missing from a printing press that he bought, and he needed someone to make that part,” Boyle said. “I developed a relationship with Don, I made the part he needed for this 1800s press that he had, and then Matt messaged me a couple months ago.”

Matthew Presutti is finishing up his first full year as OHIO faculty, serving as an assistant professor of instruction in the Printmaking and Graphic Design departments. Presutti’s responsibilities include instructing oil-based printmaking classes and managing the typeshop Adleta founded. However, the typeshop, as Adleta created it, looks a bit different as the college undergoes its facilities renewal strategy.

When the College of Fine Arts moved from Seigfred Hall to the Research and Technology Center (RTEC) as Seigfred undergoes renovations, the once expansive space which held Vandercook and Heidelberg presses, as well as bookbinding and letterpress equipment, was pared down to include only the essentials for the time being. Presutti referrers to this type of shop, located in the basement of RTEC, as a “curricular typeshop.”

“We had to acquire a couple new presses,” Presutti said. “One of the presses we bought was in pieces and we had to hire somebody to put it together. We found it in a warehouse in Cincinnati and it probably hadn’t been used in over 40 years and had been in pieces for a long time.”

Integral pieces of this press began to fall apart after a few months working and teaching with it, causing Presutti to call on Adleta’s old collaborator. 

“This was almost a disaster situation with how the press broke right before spring break, and luckily for us (Boyle) was able to fashion us a new part and have it fixed by the time the students came back after break…we’re pretty lucky to have that collaboration and interdepartmental relationship,” Presutti said.

This relationship not only allows the School of Art + Design to function, but it also gives Boyle a chance to exercise creativity from an engineer’s perspective.

“People need things repaired and fixed and reimagined in ways,” Boyle said. “I love working on this printing press because somebody is going to use it to make some cool stuff. Most of the work I do in the engineering school goes in the trash immediately, so this is a much more rewarding situation.”

On the other hand, Presutti enjoys the collaboration as it allows him to practice engineering from a creative’s perspective.

“Artists are makers, we’re fabricators in a lot of ways too,” Presutti said. “You have to have the same skill sets in order to be able to make something that’s going to be structurally sound, that could be archival…You need to understand how things go together and how things are engineered…We naturally can bond and get along with the way engineers think about putting things together, we just do it in a different way for different purposes.”

Presutti also appreciates more than these abstract benefits of the collaboration; he also sees immense value in what Boyle can provide the College of Fine Arts from a geographic and financial perspective.

“They are simple machines, but they are relatively expensive, which makes it really difficult to find replacement parts,” Presutti said. “We’re in a rural place; it’s not like there’s machine shops on every corner…We just don’t have that kind of environment here, so these kinds of collaborations for us as artists are super important.”