Bold words to say, especially to J. Jay McVicker who was then head of the art department. McVicker phoned the dean of arts and sciences and arranged Goldston’s transfer from engineering to fine arts. Goldston graduated with a bachelor’s degree in fine arts and attended graduate school at the University of Minnesota where he was a studio assistant in lithography to master printer Zigmunds Priede, who has worked with now legendary artists including Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Barnett Newman, Robert Motherwell, James Rosenquist, Helen Frankenthaler and Jim Dine. The Vietnam War altered Goldston’s plans a year later. “I was drafted and didn’t receive a deferment,” Goldston says. After the military he returned to graduate school. “I walked in the door and Zig asked me if I wanted to go to New York. I commuted back and forth between Minneapolis and New York while I finished graduate school.” Fancy doings for a man who grew up hunting rabbits, ducks, squirrel and other wildlife for dinner, herded cattle, hauled hay, slopped hogs, plucked chickens, drove big trucks and lived the life of Oklahoma farm boys in the 1950s and 1960s. That meant muscled arms and callused hands. It may have been those workman’s hands that endeared him to Tatyana Grosman, who founded Universal Limited Art Editions in 1957. The company makes original limitededition lithographs. Goldston credits Grosman, who started the business with little money and no help, with rekindling the art of lithography in the United States. Goldston tells of the day that Grosman became his mentor. She had prepared lunch for the staff, a common occurrence at the tight-knit business. Goldston, in the middle of a project, continued to work, unaware she was watching. Impressed with his attention to detail she said, “ ‘Bill, you have it, you really have it,’” Goldston remembers. “After that, she pestered me all the time with ‘Let me show you how to do this, let me show you how to do that.’” continues next page Oklahoma State university 3 The Art Experience Bill C. Goldston Distinguished Alumnus 1989 ’66 Art When you talk to Bill Goldston, it is clear that his passion is art. Hard to imagine that art was his fallback plan. Really. Goldston, who lives in Oyster Bay, N.Y., started his career at Oklahoma State University as a mechanical engineering major. “My father had an auto repair shop,” Goldston says, “so I thought I could be a mechanical engineer. They had a good engineering program. I started in the fall of 1961. I hated it. I suffered through the first two years.” After those two years, dismissed for low grades, Goldston sought out the art department, which was then an adjunct to the architecture department and housed in Whitehurst Hall. “I saw all these drawings on the wall,” he says. “I walked into the office and told the man at the desk ‘I want to be an artist.’ ”
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