This art installation turns a century of Nationality Rooms history into poetry and pattern

Imagining new Nationality Rooms

To the left of the library entrance sits the first painting in Bielak's Speculative Nationality Room series, which asks people whose relationship to nationality is layered to imagine a room of their own.

The large-scale watercolor print, "Keila (Rio de Janeiro)," was developed with Keila Grinberg, professor in the Dietrich School's Department of History and director of Pitt's Center for Latin American Studies.

Grinberg's envisioned living room opens onto a soccer field and a classroom, with Brazil's Corcovado Mountain through one window and the ocean through another. A Paulo Freire line is on the blackboard in Grinberg's own handwriting: "Education is an act of love, therefore an act of courage."

The world in patterns

The columns are wrapped in the work "Pattern Atlas." In conversation with Schmalz and Henderson, Bielak first conceived of this project as a graphic rug for the ground floor.

When it proved impossible to install given evolving needs of the space, she went vertical -- up the columns. The fabrics begin at the top of each column, above a second set of wraps drawn from the archives.

Working with students, she built a collection of more than 200 fabric and textile patterns covering 35 countries across the United Nations' eight global regions, drawing on the home countries of Pittsburgh's current immigrant populations.

Bielak said she was inspired to look for everyday patterns tied to daily life, life cycles and movement, alongside the ornamentation carved and tiled into the rooms themselves. Designers Michael Meier and Lisa Röper helped turn them into regional fabrics.

As the work travels toward the bottom of the columns, nearly 1,000 images Henderson collected from the archival boxes are arranged to resemble cyanotype blueprints tracing the rooms' development, construction and documentation.

"Spending time in the archives was a constant source of amazement," Henderson said. "Each box had its own personality, revealing an unexpected depth to the care and consideration that each committee spent in developing their room."

Inside the archives

Under the staircase sits "Holdings," a sculpture built from 31 empty archival boxes, the same containers that held the archival records, one for each of the rooms. The patterns on the sides of the boxes come from endpapers in the archives themselves.

Schmalz combed through blueprints, correspondence, planning and dedication documents, then wrote a poem distributed across the boxes' labels, drawing one line from the record of each of the rooms. The Early American Room, which the University acquired rather than planned like the others, isn't counted among the Nationality and Heritage Rooms.

"Working this way lets the specificity of those histories remain present while allowing fragments from across rooms, places and decades to speak to one another," Schmalz said. The work also speaks "to the nature of archives as fascinating, incomplete containers of histories."

Staircase stanzas

The installation continues up the stairs with two more poems - "When I Left" (ascending) and "When I Left" (descending) - both built almost entirely from words the artists found in the archives. They run along both sides of the railing on the grand staircase.

After several years combing through the archives, Schmalz and Bielak said overall they have been struck by the collection's humanity.

"There's so many personal stories. There's so many relationships," Bielak said.

For Kati Csoman, director of Pitt's Nationality Rooms and Intercultural Exchange Programs, the phrase on the staircase from which the exhibition takes its name reminds her of her father, who left Hungary as a refugee in the 1950s. "Even if people left under terrible circumstances, that place remains a part of them," she said.

As the pieces went up in July, Schmalz watched curious students slow down and ask what was happening. He said he hopes that attitude will continue throughout the exhibition, which runs through July 2027.

"I hope people come away moved by the work, curious about the process and inspired to think about what identity and belonging mean to them," he said.

Bielak said she wants visitors to be able to absorb the scale of the exhibition from the library's multiple levels, or pore over the details up close.

"We use beauty and design as strategies for inviting people into reflection. We like to create different scales of encounter," she said. "Our hope is that any level of encounter rewards attention."

Photography by Aimee Obidzinski; in the top photo, Susy Bielak looks out at "Speculative Nationality Room: Keila (Rio de Janeiro)," her watercolor print imagining a Nationality Room for Keila Grinberg, director of Pitt's Center for Latin American Studies.