University Times

The Nationality Rooms’ hidden side — about 1,000 objects, or three times the number of items the rooms actually display — soon will become accessible to the public.

These items — gathered by room organizing committees or donated through the years, and stored in a small, crowded space in the Cathedral of Learning basement — are being inventoried and photographed for a new Pitt website by Michael Walter, Nationality Rooms tour coordinator.

Nationality Rooms tour coordinator Michael Walter shows off a Romanian icon, one of about 1,000 items being inventoried and catalogued for a new website of items acquired for, but not currently displayed in, the rooms.

Some items are in storage simply because there is no display case large enough to hold them in the appropriate Nationality Room. The Yugoslav Room, for instance, has no spot for a 19th-century copy of the evangelary, or gospels, of Prince Miroslav, an illuminated manuscript produced in the late 1100s in Serbia. The thick tome is 18.5 by 13.5 inches, with 40 full-color pages reproduced at full size, the rest at half size in black and white. In 1897, the original was given to the king of Serbia, and only 350 facsimiles were produced.

Other items have an uncertain origin or likely have been modified from their original condition. A Romanian icon may have come from the 1939 World’s Fair, where the Romanian pavilion was giving them to attendees. “In this case there isn’t a lot of background information” on the item, Walter said — certainly no corroboration of the icon’s provenance. Nor has his research yet turned up how the icon came to have a frame made from fiberboard, which dates to the 20th century, but not necessarily from the World’s Fair.

Also from 1939, but no longer displayed in the Czechoslovak Room, is a small medallion depicting a man held between columns topped with swastikas. Walter has unsigned paperwork from 2003 directing the medallion be removed from display because of its political content. Even Maxine Bruhns, long-time director of the Nationality Rooms, was uncertain exactly how such a decision was made.

Many of the stored items possess great value as teaching tools, Walter said, especially for elementary classrooms.

“People have donated many dolls over the years, and they’re great for teaching of ethnic dress,” he said. Preschoolers naturally are attracted to them and want to know more, Bruhns added.

Sometimes an item is put away because it doesn’t fit with the historical period of a room’s décor. In a closet in the English room, behind a portrait of William Pitt, Walter’s crew recently discovered a Victorian Gothic Minton tile fireplace surround. Part of the original room, it was put away in 1954 and replaced by a more period-appropriate set of iron andirons and an iron fireback.

Sometimes an item is both valuable and portable, making its theft too likely to allow for display. Such is the case with a small lectern in the shape of an eagle, carved from light-colored wood, which was donated to the Irish Room.

Walter pointed to a ceramic vessel, several feet tall, that once stood in the Chinese Room. There were four such pieces on display at one time. “This is the only one that remains,” he said; the others have gone missing.

This oak podium was designed to hold a book but can’t be secured to a work surface, so it can’t be left in the Irish Room.

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The experience of one professor demonstrates how the inventoried mass of objects in storage might be used as teaching tools for Pitt classes. Katheryn M. Linduff, faculty member in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture in the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences, teaches a senior capstone course for department majors called Visualizing Heritage in Pittsburgh: The Nationality Rooms. It uses the rooms’ paper archives of organizing committee materials in Hillman Library.

“They discover all kinds of fun stuff,” she says of her students. More importantly, “the students uniformly tell me that it changed their sense of being a University of Pittsburgh student, that they felt connected to the University of Pittsburgh … They said they would never think of this University in the same way.” And they learned the processes of research, too. “It came alive to them in ways that it had never been alive before.”

Linduff visited Walter’s office to examine the Chinese vessel in storage.

Walter pointed out a seller’s tag on the piece’s underside, labeling it from the 18th century.

“This shape was first made about 900 B.C.,” Linduff said. “They were displayed and at that time [used] in ceremonies of ancestor reverence.”

However, she also noted the crackly glaze that imitated old age, and the clay attachments – design features and handles – that would have been bronze in older versions.

“In the Ching dynasty they were reviving these,” she said. “It’s probably early 20th century. This kind of thing was made again and again for display in homes.”

“So in the context of the Chinese Room, this would fit in, because it is harkening back?” Bruhns asked.

“It definitely would,” said Linduff.

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Halfway through the inventorying task, it remains “a challenge,” Walter noted. The last formal inventory of stored Nationality Rooms objects was attempted in 1995.

“We don’t have a lot of dates for when things were given, and unless they were published, we don’t have a lot of dates for when things were created.”

When the inventory website goes live sometime this spring, users will be able to search by ethnicity and by type of object. “The public will really be able to use it as a resource and a source for virtual learning,” he said.

“They’ll get to know what grandpa’s funny thing in the corner was all about,” Bruhns added.

“And objects are a great way to entice new people in” to an interest in the Nationality Rooms, Walter said — and to perhaps donating more objects. Seeing a donated object catalogued on the new Nationality Rooms website, added Bruhns, will leave people “convinced that we will treasure it as they have treasured it through the years.”

According to Walter, some items in storage occasionally are rotated with items on view in a particular room, if a suitable display case is in place, such as in the African Heritage Room and the Czechoslovak Room. He anticipates that, when there are new cases in the Yugoslav Room, “there will be an effort to keep it lively with rotating objects.” This room’s committee, Walter said, has been particularly active in recent times in seeking, designing and funding improvements to its room.

People who donate objects to the Nationality Rooms “come from all backgrounds,” Walter said: World travelers, those who work in fields that allow acquisition of traditional items, collectors and those who inherit valuable objects or those with a history or origin that can teach valuable lessons to others.

Using these items as educational outreach tools, as the website will do 24 hours a day, is “the greatest use of the items,” he said.

—Marty Levine