Globe Collection and Press

My name is Ida Greenberg. I am a senior Animation major. I was an intern at MICA's Globe Collection and Press during the summer of 2017. Globe is a historical collection of letterpress type, cuts, and posters. It also serves as a working and teaching shop, continuing to make work of iconic and bold style. Under the supervision of manager, Allison Fisher, I helped Globe create posters for organizations and events such as MICA, the Smithsonian’s 50 Years of Folklife Festival, and Guardian Baltimore’s Dance Camp for ArtScape 2017.

Globe has been a big part of my time at MICA. I learned about it my freshman year, I saw other interns work in the shop my sophomore year, and loved the posters they created during my junior year to encourage students to vote.  All this led me to apply for their internship. Being a former Printmaking major and wanting to improve my sense of graphic design, I saw the importance of Globe's collection in history and modern day and felt the need to be a part of it. As an intern, I helped keep the shop in order, created designs and layouts for posters, printed posters and broadsides, and archived/catalogued the collection of type and blocks.

From the internship I was able to learn the basics of screen and letterpress printing, building forms, the general workflow of a commercial letterpress shop, as well as develop an eye for basic graphic design. By learning about letterpress printing through a lense of history and working with type that had been used for more than fifty years has been the most fulfilling aspect of the internship. Preservation through production isn’t the typical procedure for preservation of other artifacts, so being able to work with the tradition and combine it with modern techniques is a rare experience that Globe granted me.