PGH Print Ship: Fine Art Printing That Isn’t Just “Fine”

Josh Snider is a maker. From any conversation with him, you can tell he was a born entrepreneur—the way he speaks about his business conveys his commitment to it.  Often entrepreneur stories follow the same basic format: The tugging-at-the-heartstrings cutesy anecdotes, the platitudes about the grind. 

But what sets Snider and his business, PGH Print Ship, apart is that he actually wants to talk about work. When we get on a call, there’s no platitudes. As we talked, he paused to speak to a customer who came in, so I got to hear firsthand his dedication to even a small interaction. Just as the best artist devotes their whole focus to their art, the best printer is devoted to printing. Though printing might not seem as glamorous as painting, it requires expertise. The fine arts industry would not survive without it—especially for emerging artists, prints are one of the biggest sales points and provide a way for buyers to engage with the work at a more accessible price. 

“Our job, our art is the printmaking itself and making sure the ink is going to kiss the paper exactly the best way it can, as close to the original or the closest we can get to how the customer wants other people to be viewing it,” Snider said of his process. Snider and his partner, Brittany Sipe, whom he runs the business with, are mainstays of the Pittsburgh art community for their affordability and accessibility in printmaking. I’ve used PGH Print Ship myself to print business cards or make editions for art shows. A quick scroll through their Instagram highlights the variety of their clients, from brewery signage to outdoor event banners to prints for local Pittsburgh artists.  

“Our job, our art is the printmaking itself and making sure the ink is going to kiss the paper exactly the best way it can, as close to the original or the closest we can get to how the customer wants other people to be viewing it”

But, in the past year, PGH Print Ship has upped their game. May marked the business’s ten-year anniversary, and they moved to a new location in Sharpsburg, home to more arts businesses than their previous office’s neighborhood. Snider recently pursued three certificates from paper and fine art printing companies: Ilford, Canson, and Hahnemüehle. Ilford is a film and camera company that offers certifications for printing partners for the highest quality photo prints. Canson has been making paper since the 1500s and the likes of Picasso and Van Gogh used them. In order to get the Canson seal of approval, PGH Print Ship had to send paper into their lab as test prints. Hahnemühle, based in Germany, has an excellence program that requires four stages of certifications for a printer to qualify. Less than ten print shops in the world have all three of these certifications. PGH Print Ship is one. 

Along with those three new certifications, Snider has become a member of the American Alliance of Museums and moved into a new venture: Printing services for museums. When he said prints for museums, I assumed that meant gift shop prints for sale, but there’s more than meets the eye to how a printer and a museum can collaborate. “There’s many use cases where museums need to use a printer,” Snider explained. “Sometimes curators make a digital print of something they couldn’t get an original of. Sometimes their loans are up before a show goes up, so they need to use a print in the meantime. Or, there was one that I talked to who said ‘There’s this one piece that’s kind of controversial so we have it hidden away, it might be good to put a print of it up so if someone does throw a can of soup on it or something, you’re not destroying the real piece.” He paused and added: “She didn’t tell me what the piece was.” 

PGH Print Ship is now a printing partner for the largest museum in Pittsburgh, the Warhol, and the Mattress Factory, as well as a presence at the American Alliance of Museums Expo convention each year. Snider’s goal is to get on the radar of even more museums. While he already has national clients for individual printing, he wants to do more of the museum outreach. “I like doing copies and signage, but fine art printing is what’s most interesting to me,” he reflected. “It’s not as exciting, there’s not much more we could do differently with copying, versus the fine art printing there’s a big difference between what we do and what someone else can do.” 

“The more challenging customers are some of my favorites, because they’ve pushed us to shed light on problems and improve them. Those have been welcome interactions. We try to face those challenges and get better”

What they do differently is their rigor, focus on environmentally sustainable materials, and printing capabilities with their 12-color system printer that has both a CMYK and RGB system. “I made a custom sample booklet for the 30 different types of paper we’re using – different canvas types, metallics, fine art papers like dry, satins, gloss. We tested for better quality and better price and made 5-12 of each paper, then we went down the list of 150 different fine art and photography papers until we found the top 30. They’re all super different. You can fine-tune all these little things,” Snider said. Certain glossy papers hold darker colors better, and certain cotton papers hold lights or pastels. He keeps all of them on hand in rolls to make sure he’s prepared for any potential customer. “We go a little bit above and beyond to take extra steps. I’d like to empower museums to be able to get specific things at a wholesale rate.”

True to his entrepreneurial spirit, Snider isn’t afraid of potential pitfalls. “The more challenging customers are some of my favorites, because they’ve pushed us to shed light on problems and improve them. Those have been welcome interactions. We try to face those challenges and get better,” he said. This May, Snider took his second trip to the American Alliance of Museum Expo in Baltimore to promote PGH Print Ship. But the day-to-day still remains important. “We’re a small business. We’re here every day, we’re not just seeing every print but making every print. We’re able to stay on top of quality and make sure what we’re doing is good work,” he said. “Quality is more important than volume.” To grow the business will require balancing the local customer base with national outreach. No matter what he does next, Snider is on a roll, and his integrity is going to carry him forward. The next Picasso could be using PGH Print Ship’s printing services in Pittsburgh, while at museums around the country Picasso’s images might appear on their paper. 

Emma Riva is the managing editor of UP. She is the author of Night Shift in Tamaqua, an illustrated novel that follows a love story between 24-hour-diner waitress and a Postmates driver. As an art writer, she is particularly interested in working with international artists and exploring how visual art can both transcend cultural boundaries and highlight the complexities of individual identity. Emma is a graduate of The New School and a Wilbur and Niso Smith Author of Tomorrow. She lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Insta: @emmawithglasses

Website: emmawithglasses.com