By SHANNON O. WELLS

When Aaron Henderson was introduced to artists Susy Bielak and Fred Schmalz about two years ago, the chemistry and synergy were undeniable.

“Sometimes you have these meetings when you just know that there’s something that is a deeper, more significant connection, and this was exactly one of those,” said Henderson, chair of the Department of Studio Arts in Pitt’s Dietrich School of Arts & Sciences.

They began a project thinking about the history of Pitt’s Nationality Rooms.

“As we spent time in those archives, they were so rich, so complicated, so beautiful that they wanted to become something else,” he said. “And what that became is what you see here in front of you now.”

What those gathered at an afternoon artists’ talk on Sept. 2 saw in front of them was a virtual artistic and atmospheric transformation of the cavernous Hillman Library atrium.

The multifaceted, four-element “I am made to leave I am made to return” exhibit — a collaboration by Bielak and Schmalz with Henderson — draws its inspiration from Pitt’s Nationality Rooms in the Cathedral of Learning and University Library System (ULS) Archives and Special Collections in an effort to offer “dynamic and speculative reflections on nationality, heritage, migration and belonging,” the exhibit description says.

The installation was created to promote consideration of how archives preserve cultural memory while remaining open to interpretation and together invite those who experience it to “reimagine what a library can be in the 21st century.”

The installation’s four interconnected artworks that unfold across Hillman’s new atrium, dramatic staircase and entry areas include:

• “Pattern Atlas,” complex, colorful, kaleidoscopic artistic “wraps” around the atrium’s towering white columns.

• “Speculative Nationality Room,” an expansive, dynamic painting on the bulkhead below the atrium windows and platform stairs.

• “When I Left,” cursive-style texts on the high staircase featuring expanded language of the “I am made to leave I am made to return” theme.

• “Holdings,” a sculpture under the high staircase along with blueprint column wraps depicting a condensed section of the ULS Archives.

“We visited this space last year, and it wasn’t even open to the public yet,” Henderson explained. “And it became our kind of muse for this project as well. It really was this complex interplay between space and the archives, and also our collaboration that is what you see here today.”

Born in Mexico City, Bielak, who, like Schmalz resides in Chicago, said she’s been drawn to the Nationality Rooms since she was a child growing up in Pittsburgh “for their richness and complexity.”

In the “Speculative Nationality Room” series, she said in a statement that she invites people “whose relationships to home and nationality are multivalent to imagine a room of their own.

“The paintings become portraits — not only of people, but of how personal and layered our constructions of home and nationality can be.”

Speaking during the installation talk, which drew dozens of spectators, Bielak said the invitation to do something at Hillman was about her and her fellow artists “thinking about what a library is today.

“And with that, to also say that we are the kinds of artists who dig deep, who are researchers, but as artists, really look anew at different things.”

She described the mural-scale “Speculative Nationality Room” painting as the “print of a watercolor” that originally was about 5 feet wide. Regarding the title, she acknowledged her father, who attended the Hillman installation, and members of her “home community.”

“I grew up... (with) multilingual people from all over the world who largely went to teach, but not solely,” she explained. “I grew up in a really fertile environment, and as a young person also interested in material culture, I was fascinated by the Nationality Rooms and everything that they offered, including the ways in which each surface of the room is really inscribed with history.”

She also noted there were “no rooms representing Spanish-speaking countries.”

She found inspiration in Andrey Avinoff, former director of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History and Pitt professor of art and biology.

“He was also a key driving force behind creating the Russian Room. And among many other talents, he was an incredible watercolorist,” Bielak noted. “When I saw his watercolor and I thought about my own watercolor, thinking about memory and diaspora, I thought an interesting project would be to approach people who might not be represented in these rooms, or people for whom identity is complex and relationships to nationhood are complex, to do portraits, to enter into dialog and conversation, to create a very personalized nationality room.

“So the goal of the ‘Speculative Nationality Rooms’ is really in dialog with incredible intent, material history, culture — the forward-looking presence of the team that is working with nationality rooms, but is really inviting all of us to think about what is a room of your own, what might it look like.”

She co-conceived “Holdings” with Fred Schmalz, a poet, author and editor as well as an artist, who called the Nationality Rooms archives “an extraordinarily rich record — blueprints, correspondence, planning documents, pattern designs, and ephemera — related to the rooms’ development.”

For “Holdings,” he said he mined that archival record to compose a poem that draws one line of language from the record of each of the 31 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 — and to the nature of archives as fascinating, incomplete containers of histories.”

Written by Schmalz in collaboration with Bielak, the “When I Left” poems on the exterior and interior of the grand staircase draw primarily from the records of Nationality Room committees’ archives held by the ULS Archives and Special Collections.

The main exterior text, “I am made to leave I am made again / to return,” adapts a line from poet Marwa Helal, who was said to have adapted the phrase from a graffiti tag by the New York artist ESPO, the art exhibit website description explained.

The two texts along the inside of the staircase “consider the ways every departure is itself an arrival, and vice versa,” it said.

Kornelia Tancheva, director of the University Library System, said the artwork being dedicated celebrates “what libraries and archives stand for, the preservation of the past, and the possibility that we can be in a dialog with the past.

“It is worth remembering that you can never have a conversation with what happened in the past, if nothing of the past is preserved.”

While archives are not perfect or ever complete,  because “somebody has made choices of what is preserved and what isn’t, and archives are never able to represent every single point of view … without archives and without libraries, that dialog with the past is never possible.

“This is one of the reasons why this work is here in the library, and we at the University Library System are proud to preserve the archives of the Nationality Rooms.”

Shannon O. Wells is a writer for the University Times. Reach him at shannonw@pitt.edu.

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