Frick Environmental Center exhibit evokes iconic Vanka murals for a new era

The murals of Croatian immigrant artist Maksimilijan “Maxo” Vanka have loomed over Millvale’s St. Nicholas Church for more than 80 years, heavily integrating the immigrant experience in the United States.

Now, a new generation of creators is picking up that conversation.

On Thursday, the Frick Environmental Center in Frick Park will open “Maxo Vanka: Gift to America 2.0: New Voices, New Walls.” The exhibition will include pieces in a variety of artistic media created by BIPOC and immigrant artists, chosen by the Society to Preserve the Millvale Murals of Maxo Vanka from more than 30 applicants to craft art inspired by the Vanka murals.

According to the Pittsburgh Parks Conservancy, selections from the Vanka Collection, founded in 2019 with a gift of more than 130 original works on paper from Vanka’s granddaughter, Marya Halderman, and her husband, John, will also be on display.

James Brown, director of education for the Pittsburgh Parks Conservancy, is looking forward to bringing this vibrant new exhibition to the Frick Environmental Center.

“We’ve been kind of reviving the gallery over the past couple of years, and we now have a pretty steady rotation,” Brown said. “I think we’re always trying to explore the interconnectedness of nature to different things.”

Brown pointed out that nature is part of the story that Vanka was trying to tell in his original murals.

“Everything is in balance and relies on each other; no one element is more important than the other. I think that’s what’s beautiful about the stories that these artists are telling,” he said. “They’re talking about immigration, they’re talking about justice, they’re talking about maternity and motherhood. They’re talking about dimensions of human life that are all interconnected and rely upon each other.”

The four artists selected for this set of commissions, which launched in 2021, bring together diverse local artists to follow in the footsteps of Vanka.

Works to be displayed were done in media including paint on canvas, mixed media, digital collage and even non-narrative film.

Husband-and-wife filmmaking team Ahmed and Lily Ragheb hadn’t seen the Vanka Murals at St. Nicholas Church until they were working on their piece for “Gift to America 2.0.” The couple has lived locally for six years.

“When the open call came up, it was the perfect opportunity to have our art engage with the city a little bit more, and especially with the city’s immigrant past, which is something we engage with all the time in our work,” Lily Ragheb said.

The writing-directing team met in high school in Egypt. Ahmed comes from Dutch and Egyptian parents, and Lily is American with a Russian father who grew up between the States and Egypt.

“A lot of our films have to do with our own histories and backgrounds,” Lily Ragheb said.

Their dual-channel video installation, “Khaled Misplaces a Photograph of His Mother’s House in Nablus,” is non-narrative but evokes the transient feelings of migration and loneliness in the setting of a motel room.

The creation and shooting of the Raghebs’ film was a quick process with only one actor.

“We knew that we wanted to explore Arab-American identity or Arab immigration — and specifically Palestine — but we didn’t have a specific image or story that we were interested in until we saw the murals,” Lily Ragheb said.

Other artists in the exhibition include Fran Flaherty, a first-generation immigrant mother from the Philippines and a Deaf artist; Juliandra Jones, a self-taught mixed media artist, muralist, live painter, entrepreneur and educator; and Sheila Cuellar-Shaffer, a Colombian-American artist whose acrylic-on-canvas painting “Donde el rio encunetra al mar” will be on display.

“Standing in St. Nicholas Croatian Catholic Church, surrounded by Maxo Vanka’s murals, feels profoundly like entering a dialogue that spans generations,” Cuellar-Shaffer said in a news release. “As a migrant myself and a participant in the Gift to America 2.0 initiative, I felt a deep connection to the murals. They served as a compelling visual language, allowing me to engage with Vanka on enduring themes present in our work: migration, motherhood and the pursuit of justice.”

Ahmed Ragheb was struck by how unvarnished the picture of American immigration was in Vanka’s works.

“The murals, they show glory in the immigrant experience, but they don’t glorify it,” he said.

The couple is thankful to the Society to Preserve the Millvale Murals of Maxo Vanka for pulling together this cohort of artists.

“All the other artists involved are doing amazing work and it’s really a wonderful collection that the Vanka Society brought together,” Ahmed Ragheb said.