A Gift to America: Maxo Vanka and the Millvale Murals

Mary, Queen of Croatia, St. Nicholas Croatian Catholic Church, 1937.
Society to Preserve the Millvale Murals of Maxo Vanka / Rob Long-Clear Story

“This is my gift to America,” declared Croatian artist Maksimilijan “Maxo” Vanka (1889–1963) in 1941, when he completed a vast mural cycle for a small Catholic church in Millvale, Pennsylvania, a working-class town just across the river from Pittsburgh. A recent émigré, Vanka had not yet been in the United States a full decade when he completed the 4,500 square feet of wall painting for St. Nicholas Croatian Catholic Church. Although painted decorations in churches are commonplace and Depression-era murals were plentiful, Vanka’s “Millvale Murals” are anything but typical.

Under the choir loft, we see a scene of the Virgin Mary on the battlefield. Enveloped in smoke, she interposes herself between two soldiers, snapping off the bayonet from one man’s weapon and blocking the barrel of the other’s gun. Next to this scene, we find an image of Christ on the cross, his heart fully exposed and his body sickly green and mottled with open sores, the crown of thorns now a ring of barbed wire on his head. A soldier to his right pierces his chest with a bayonet, as Christ’s eyes widen in horror. Another panel presents the gruesome outcome of a mine disaster, with mothers mourning one of their dead sons.

Mary on the Battlefield and Christ on the Battlefield, St. Nicholas Croatian Catholic Church, 1941.
Society to Preserve the Millvale Murals of Maxo Vanka / Pawsburgh Photography

Even the more common Catholic images and scenes are invested with a wholly unique approach. A monumental seated Madonna presides over the apse. With a Byzantine-like stare and the Christ Child in her lap, she commands the space. Instead of the traditional blue robe, this Virgin Mary is dressed in white, blue and red with embroidered details — reminiscent of Croatian traditional dress. Above her, written in Croatian: “Marijo-Kralijice Hrvala-moli za nas” (“Mary, Queen of Croatians, Pray for us”). To her left we see peasants praying in a pastoral setting, and to her right are laborers and millworkers in the southwestern Pennsylvania landscape offering a model of the church to the heavens.

To some, these scenes may seem shocking, but as atypical as they are, the Millvale Murals are the perfect convergence of myriad strands, woven together to produce this singular cycle. Vanka was an odd choice for the Millvale commission. He was not a resident of this community. He was not a devout Catholic, much less a member of the congregation. Although he was a well-known artist in Croatia, he was just beginning to build a new career in the United States. Moreover, except for one earlier project in Croatia, Vanka was not an experienced muralist. Yet, he proved to be the perfect voice for this space and this audience. The Millvale Murals were the culmination of many factors, local and global, personal and political. For a fee of about $5,000, Vanka transformed the walls of this humble church into a testament to the lives of Croatian immigrants in the United States as well as one of the boldest antiwar statements in mural form in the early 20th century.

From Peasant to Painter: Vanka in Croatia, 1889–1934

From peasant to aristocrat, from famed artist to unknown émigré, Maxo Vanka’s life reads like a fable. Born in 1889 in Zagreb, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Vanka came of age amid the turbulent and complicated backdrop of a country at the center of international conflicts, struggling for national identity in the early 20th century.

According to sources (including the artist’s own retelling), Vanka was the illegitimate son of Habsburg aristocrats. Because of the prejudices of the day, he was sent to live in the Croatian countryside with a Zagorje peasant woman, Dora Jugova, soon after his birth. Through his foster family, Vanka developed a strong attachment to the customs and plights of peasants in his homeland, particularly women in that culture. When has was 8, Vanka was claimed by a biological relative, perhaps his maternal grandmother. She sent him to live on a landed estate, which was worked by peasants. These foundational experiences gave him a firsthand view of the lives of Croatian peasants from two very distinct perspectives.

Spring Blessings by Maxo Vanka, c. 1920s.
Courtesy of the Vanka Family

Now afforded the opportunities of a privileged class, Vanka began studying art at the College for Arts and Crafts in Zagreb and the Royal Academy of Beaux Arts in Brussels. Although Vanka pursued a rigorous classical training in art, he also studied with artists who worked in more modernist styles, such as the Symbolist painter Bela Sesjia (1864–1931), who experimented with dreamlike and fantastical imagery. It was this blend of classical training and more modernist styles that emerges in Vanka’s work in the United States.

As an Austro-Hungarian citizen in Belgium when World War I broke out, Vanka was in an especially precarious position. A committed pacifist, he did not take up arms, but he did witness the devastation of the battlefield firsthand. He served with a Red Cross unit when the Germans invaded Belgium — this experience profoundly impacted his life and his art, particularly the Millvale Murals, and solidified his lifelong pacifism. One work produced during the war, Our Mothers, which depicts a group of Croatian peasant women mourning a fallen soldier (“their son”), served as the basis for one of the Millvale scenes.

Portrait of Dora Pejacevic by Maxo Vanka, c. 1920s.
Courtesy of the Vanka Family

Vanka returned to Zagreb after the First World War and became a professor of art at the Zagreb Academy of Art in 1920. As an artist in the newly formed Kingdom of Yugoslavia (or the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes), Vanka was intimately involved in efforts to shape a new national identity based on folkloric and ethnic traditions. His interest in and respect for Croatia’s peasant cultures and national traditions is clear. In works such as Spring Blessings, for example, Vanka more directly depicted Croatian peasantry and costumes, which he painstakingly rendered for accuracy. In his portraits, like his image of composer Dora Pejacevic, Vanka merged traditional academic painting with local symbolism and landscape to celebrate Croatian public figures.

In 1931 Vanka married Margaret Stetten, a Jewish American woman and the daughter of a wealthy New York surgeon whom he first met in 1926 when he was hired to give her art lessons. With Europe on the brink of war and the growing anti-Semitism there, Vanka and Stetten immigrated to the United States in 1934 with their young daughter, Peggy. Like so many artists who saw no other choice but to flee rising fascism in Europe, Vanka left reluctantly. Having built his career in Croatia, he was now faced with an unknown future in a country he did not know and where he was not known.

Shortly before Maxo Vanka immigrated to the United States, an exhibition of his paintings was held in Zagreb. It brought together works from his 20-year career in Croatia and also marked a farewell for the artist. Apart from one brief visit in 1936, Vanka would not return to his homeland again before his death in 1963. Though he would carry his dedication to folklorism and antiwar messaging with him to a new land, immigration marked a new chapter in his career.

Vanka in America

Vanka’s decision to move to the United States was in large part to ensure his family’s safety, but writer Louis Adamic (1898–1951) was also central to this decision. A Yugoslav immigrant and well-known socialist writer, Adamic was a key figure in Vanka’s life. The two first met in Korcula, Croatia, when the writer was there on a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1932, but their relationship grew once Vanka was in the United States. Today, Adamic is remembered for his writing on labor, but in the 1930s he was better known for his tracts on immigration. Rather than espousing the melting pot ideology that had been so pervasive in the early 20th century, Adamic advocated for pluralism and was particularly interested in the lives and identities of the first- and second-generation Americans. Adamic would become not only the conduit for the Millvale commission but also Vanka’s de facto publicist. He wrote articles about the artist, recounted their journeys together, and even penned a fictionalized account of Vanka’s childhood, Cradle of Life: The Story of One Man’s Beginnings (1936). Adamic’s recollections were often the most detailed — although perhaps not wholly accurate — perspective on Vanka in America.

Vanka and his family may have settled in the Upper East Side in Manhattan, among the social network of the Stetten family, but it was the city as a whole — from Battery Park to uptown — that fascinated him. After arriving in New York, the artist spent hours walking the island and sketching the scenes he encountered. Adamic recalled: “[Vanka] ‘bummed around’ with his sketchbook; then came to me with vivid word pictures accompanied by pencil drawings, of the unemployed living in fantastic ‘Hootervilles’ on both ends of the Williamsburg Bridge, of diverse Bowery degenerates and unfortunates, of prostitutes on the lowest rung of their profession, of drunkards imbibing shoe polish and ‘canned heat’ and of other characters from the substrata of American society. I saw that, somehow, his sympathies and proclivities drew him in that direction more than Park Avenue.”

Shortly after arriving in the United States, Vanka also accompanied Adamic on the author’s lecture tour of the Northeast. Together they visited urban and industrial centers like Cleveland, Washington, D.C., and mill towns in Pennsylvania. Given their shared backgrounds and interests, one can only imagine the conversations between Vanka and Adamic as they traversed the United States during the height of the Great Depression, and how these conversations must have shaped Vanka’s views and his work in the U.S, especially his Millvale Murals.

In 1935, too, Adamic and Vanka spent 10 days in Pittsburgh. According to Adamic, Vanka was particularly taken by the city: “Pittsburgh — with its great, smoking, flaming steel mills and its ugliness which is so honest and intense it almost becomes beauty — excited Maxo even more than New York.”

Johnstown Mill by Maxo Vanka, 1937.
Society to Preserve the Millvale Murals of Maxo Vanka, Vanka Collection

An industrial city and a hub for immigration in the early 20th century, Pittsburgh was especially hard hit by the Great Depression, and this impact was clearly articulated in the city’s public murals. In the 1930s Pittsburgh became a center for radical approaches to mural-making. Earlier in the century, the city boasted some of the most high-profile and innovative mural commissions of the early 1900s, from the multifloor cycle by John White Alexander, The Crowning of Labor, in the Carnegie Museum of Art to Boardman Robinson’s History of Trade in the Kaufmann Department Store. Using these as a springboard for political messaging, the radical nature of Pittsburgh murals took flight under Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, when artists were put on the federal payroll. Artists were contracted to paint public buildings such as post offices, schools and courthouses across the country, from small towns to big cities, with scenes that celebrated American history and fortitude.

In Pittsburgh, these federally commissioned murals, however, were uniquely inflected by the radical labor culture of the city, and muralists used public spaces to convey powerful political messages. One artist rendered the Pittsburgh skyline in the shape of a hammer and sickle in a federal courthouse, others celebrated mill workers and laborers on a monumental scale rather than the scions of industry. Still others rebuked a corrupt legal system through contentious allegorical images of justice. So active was the radical mural culture that Leland Knoch, the self-proclaimed artist of the proletariat, commented in 1934: “I don’t see how an artist could exist here in the midst of all of this labor activity and not feel it. If it doesn’t touch him, he isn’t any more than a hack. The pageantry of many races churning against a background of heavy industry has always been stimulating to my imagination; Without debating the Rotarian bromide that Pittsburgh is the ‘Workshop of the World’: we must admit that this is a city of workingmen, and adequate interpretation of the city must include them.” Undoubtedly, Vanka who fully submerged himself in his surroundings, whether in Croatia or Pittsburgh, absorbed this fervor.

Vanka’s drawings and sketchbooks from that time not only chronicle his path through the city, but also demonstrate his eye for observation, his skill as a draftsperson, and his continued concern for the laboring classes. Adopting a decidedly Social Realist style, Vanka sketched newish skyscrapers, such as the Gulf Tower downtown and the Cathedral of Learning in the Oakland neighborhood. He captured the billowing smoke and towering smokestacks of the mills along the river, and mill workers’ houses high on the hills. As in Croatia, his eye was again more drawn to and sympathetic toward the laboring classes, rather than the elite.

In May 1935, too, Pittsburghers had their first opportunity to see Vanka’s work, thanks to a solo exhibition arranged by the Yugoslav consul at the Wunderly Galleries downtown. The artist was praised for depictions of his homeland, its landscapes and its customs, and his emphasis on the folkloric and (for some of the Pittsburgh audiences) exotic aspects of Croatian culture. Given the robust Croatian community in the city, it is not surprising that Vanka’s Pittsburgh exhibition garnered more attention than his New York show, even though many of the same works were shown. It was through this exhibition, too, that Vanka came to the attention of the elders of St. Nicholas Croatian Catholic Church in Millvale.

From Barren Walls to Pictures of Modern Significance

Millvale lies just across the Allegheny River from downtown Pittsburgh. As its name implies, the town was built around iron manufacturing, lumber mills and breweries, and the residents were primarily immigrants who worked in those industries. A large percentage of Yugoslav immigrants who had flocked to the Pittsburgh area in the first decades of the 20th century settled there.

High on a knoll in Millvale, St. Nicholas Croatian Catholic Church was the center of this community. Originally built in 1900, St. Nick’s was the first Croatian Catholic Church in the United States. It was composed of immigrants from diverse regions of Yugoslavia. In fact, the multiethnic congregation led to its reputation as the “storm center for Croatian factionists” in the early part of the century. After a 1921 fire, which some attributed to this very factionist antagonism, the church was completely rebuilt.

View of the sanctuary at St. Nicholas Croatian Catholic Church.
Society to Preserve the Millvale Murals of Maxo Vanka / Pawsburgh Photography

It was shortly after the new yellow-brick church was completed that Father Albert Zagar became the head pastor. Like Vanka and Adamic, Zagar was born in Croatia (though of Slovenian descent). He came to the United States as part of a wave of Franciscan priests who immigrated to build and grow the Croatian Franciscan Commissariat in the United States. After arriving in Pittsburgh in 1927, Zagar first served at St. Nicholas Croatian Church on the North Side before transferring to Millvale’s St. Nick’s. Perhaps fueled by the mural fervor in the United States at that moment or inspired by decorations in other churches, Father Zagar longed to see the barren white walls of the church transformed into a decoration that would be meaningful to the people who sat in the pews and whose lives were punctuated and sustained by rites performed in that space. Indeed, Vanka would later celebrate Zagar as the “only priest in 100,000 who [was] courageous enough to break with tradition, to have his church decorated with pictures of modern, social significance.”

So, when Frank X. Kolander and other church members who had visited the Wunderly Gallery exhibition suggested Vanka, the many disparate strands came together.

The 1937 Murals

Pastoral Croatia, St. Nicholas Croatian Catholic Church, 1937.
Society to Preserve the Millvale Murals of Maxo Vanka / Rob Long-Clear Story

Vanka returned to Pittsburgh in March 1937 to meet with Zagar and prepare sketches for the commission. Other than a request that he include some religious scenes, Zagar gave Vanka the freedom to paint as he wished. With this liberty, Vanka wove together his past works from Croatia with his new experiences in his adopted country. The final cycle consists of 25 main paintings completed in two stages, first in 1937 and then in 1941, over approximately 12 to 14 weeks. It was a feat by any standard and the production of the murals has been steeped in myth since their completion. Newspaper articles at the time recounted Vanka’s feverish painting sessions in which the sleepless artist was fueled only by coffee and artistic passion. Even tales of a ghost (a former pastor) visiting Vanka in the dead of the night persist to this day.

In the 1937 murals, as per Zagar’s request, Vanka included more traditional iconography of the four evangelists in the transepts, a crucifixion scene, and images of the pieta to the left and right of the altar, as well as the monumental Madonna and Child. It is the four scenes that explore the experiences of Croatian immigrants, however, that distinguish the first murals. Pivoting around the central Madonna and Child, Vanka traces the contrasts and the continuities of the old world and the new world. Far from just prosaic images of immigrant life, the works possess a decidedly politicized narrative, which not only focuses attention on laboring classes in Croatia and the United States but also highlights the injustices suffered by both communities.

Croatians in America, St. Nicholas Croatian Catholic Church, 1937.
Society to Preserve the Millvale Murals of Maxo Vanka / Rob Long-Clear Story

To the left of the main altar, Pastoral Croatia shows a Croatian farm scene with peasants kneeling and standing in prayer. In the background, the ploughed fields and church underscore both their labor and their faith. Drawing from his earlier works, Vanka painstakingly rendered the embroidery and design of the peasants’ dress, as he had in earlier works. To the right of the altar, the companion scene depicts immigrant workers, presumably from the Millvale community, in overalls carrying pickaxes, shovels and pails. The figure in the foreground holds a scale model of St. Nicholas Church. To the left of this group, Vanka included a depiction of Father Zagar, kneeling and looking heavenward as he presents the group (and the church) to God. In the background, the pastoral landscape of the first image has been transformed into an industrial scene, with smokestacks belching anthracite. In the distance, the skyline of Pittsburgh rises, replete with rivers, bridges and skyscrapers. For churchgoers, many recent immigrants or first-generation Americans, the scenes of both the Croatian and the southwestern Pennsylvania landscapes would have been abundantly familiar. Moreover, Vanka’s inclusion of recognizable figures, like Zagar, would have provided an even deeper connection for his viewers.

Croatian Mothers Give Their Sons to War, St. Nicholas Croatian Catholic Church, 1937.
Society to Preserve the Millvale Murals of Maxo Vanka / Pawsburgh Photography

On the other side of the church, two other panels extend this narrative, drawing out more emphatically the injustices faced by each group. On the rear left wall, Vanka borrowed from his earlier painting, Our Mothers, for his Croatian Mothers Give Their Sons to War. Like the original composition, Vanka depicts a gathering of Croatian mothers, dressed in traditional white pleated dresses and headcoverings, who surround the body of a fallen soldier (a son) laid out in a casket. They weep and pray against the backdrop of Croatian hills. The ploughed fields we saw in Pastoral Croatia have now been transformed into rows of white crosses, signifying countless other deaths. Other “mothers” carry the casket of yet another fallen son in the distance. The textile under the casket and the costumes of the women evoke the folkloric traditions of central Croatia, an area where Vanka spent a great deal of time studying the ethnography and traditional designs.

Immigrant Mother Gives Her Sons for American Industry, St. Nicholas Croatian Catholic Church, 1937.
Society to Preserve the Millvale Murals of Maxo Vanka / Pawsburgh Photography

The pendant scene, on the opposite wall, transports the viewer from Croatia to the United States. In a landscape evocative of southwestern Pennsylvania, the steep hills are crowned by mills and ramshackle houses. The mourning mothers in the foreground, now dressed in blue, surround a dead millworker whose body is laid out on a Croatian American newspaper. In the background, miners return to work and the mills continue their ceaseless production despite the tragedy. According to Vanka, the scene was based on a mine disaster outside of Johnstown in which 72 miners were trapped and a woman lost four sons. From peasants to workers, from death on the battlefield to death in industry, Vanka’s emphasis on the communal suffering of the working classes bonds the two scenes and two communities. By fusing his past works and folkloric imagery with more contemporary scenes and images, these murals directly spoke to the diverse Croatian congregation who sat in the pews of St. Nicholas every week. In fact, when the murals were dedicated in June 1937, Croatian immigrants lauded Vanka’s representation, and major newspapers and magazines heralded the murals’ powerful messages, not just for the Croatian immigrants but for all immigrants.

Injustice, St. Nicholas Croatian Catholic Church, 1941.
Society to Preserve the Millvale Murals of Maxo Vanka / Pawsburgh Photography

The 1941 Murals

The world had irrevocably changed in the four-year interim between the dedication of the first murals and Vanka’s return to Millvale in 1941. Fascist forces spread across Europe, including the emergence of the Independent Fascist Party in Croatia, and the continent was fully enmeshed in World War II. Though the United States had not yet entered the war, it seemed all but inevitable. Zagar called Vanka — who had left New York for a more peaceful life in Pennsylvania’s Bucks County in 1941 — back to Millvale to add to his program. Though still in dialogue with the earlier series, Vanka’s 1941 murals responded to the changed political conditions and the growing violence in Europe.

Included in the 1941 set are the panels of the Virgin Mary and Christ on the battlefield, discussed earlier. In addition, Vanka added other scenes that were also in direct dialogue with both the escalating war overseas as well as the currents in the city of Pittsburgh. On the south wall, Vanka contrasted an angelic depiction in Justice with the frightening image of Injustice. Though allegorical images of vices and virtues were not atypical in church murals, Vanka jarringly brings the representation into the modern day. Here, the figure of Injustice wears a gas mask and wields a bloodied sword, the scales of justice off-kilter, with gold coins far outvaluing a meager piece of bread.

In response to Injustice, Vanka locates Mati (Mother) on the opposite wall. This 15-foot image of a Croatian mother chained to a cross is a striking and blatant reference to Croatia at that moment, as well as an extension of Vanka’s earlier themes. Mati, with her head fallen forward and her body sagging in pain, is a symbol of Vanka’s (and the congregants’) homeland, beleaguered and in pain. She stands on a book, inscribed with a dedication to Adamic, which makes her symbolism clear. The Mother — be it the Virgin Mary, the Croatian Mother or Immigrant Mother from the 1937 series — is a recurring and unifying symbol throughout Vanka’s program and culminates in Mati. But here Vanka offers a hope to his viewers: a linden tree, the symbol of Croatia, sprouts at her feet.

In this daring antiwar statement, Vanka also squarely points to the source of the global ills and injustices: The Capitalist. Located above the exit door, this scene focuses on a skeletal figure wearing a top hat and smoking a cigarette. He feasts on a luxurious dinner served to him by an African American servant, while another crawling figure in the foreground receives only crumbs. The Capitalist peruses the stock reports without a care to the suffering around him. Dark and foreboding, Vanka leaves no doubt as to what he sees as the root of the injustice and devastation, in both Croatia and the United States. As the last scene before exiting the church, too, Vanka pointedly reminds viewers of this fact before they leave this sanctuary and re-enter the world. Vanka’s depiction is a stark rebuke of the celebration of the scions of industry in murals such as Alexander’s Crowning of Labor at the Carnegie Museum of Art. Instead, Vanka’s imagery aligned more with the radical murals of the 1930s in Pittsburgh. Here, as he had done in Croatia, Vanka wove in the styles and themes of his environment to formulate a powerful statement.

Mati, St. Nicholas Croatian Catholic Church, 1941.
Society to Preserve the Millvale Murals of Maxo Vanka / Pawsburgh Photography

Afterwards

Vanka completed this second set of murals in November 1941, just weeks before the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the United States’ entrance into the Second World War. Accelerated war mobilization and reinvigorated nationalism in the United States left no room for Vanka’s antiwar statement. Although his works were praised in the press, the murals did not receive the attention that they might have at another time. Vanka retreated to his home in Bucks County for the remainder of his life. There he became a beloved art professor and continued to paint.

Vanka travelled the world but never returned to Croatia. Apart from a brief visit to Millvale in 1951, to paint additional minor decorations, Vanka did not return to St. Nick’s. His murals — Vanka’s “gift to America” — however, have accompanied parishioners and visitors for more than 80 years, serving as the backdrop for Sunday masses, weddings, funerals, and now, tours and special events. Vanka’s scenes spoke to the men, women and children who occupied the pews of St. Nicholas. Like the artist himself, they were immigrants struggling to make a home in an unfamiliar land at a challenging time, from a country that was itself divided and struggling to find a national identity. Today, the themes that Vanka explored seem as relevant as they were in 1941, and his call for sympathy and social justice for immigrants and the working class are more urgent than ever.

The Millvale Murals Today

The Society to Preserve the Millvale Murals of Maxo Vanka (SPMMMV) was incorporated in 1991. For more than 30 years, it has led the efforts to save and share the nationally recognized, one-of-a-kind murals painted by immigrant artist Maxo Vanka in two creative sessions in 1937 and 1941 within St. Nicholas Croatian Catholic Church in Millvale, Allegheny County.

SPMMMV promotes and preserves the timeless stories within the murals — dramatic portrayals of the immigrant experience and the horrors of war, the imperative of social justice, and the resilience of community and ethnic identity all within a transformative period in our nation’s history. Each year, SPMMMV collaborates with community-based arts and culture organizations to highlight the enduring relevance of the themes within the Vanka murals to our world today — specifically justice and injustice and the immigrant experience.

Maxo Vanka in 1946.
Courtesy of the Vanka Family

Regular Saturday tours are augmented by private tours requested by individuals, organizations, schools and other private groups. They are offered by trained volunteer docents, including many who have personal connections to St. Nicholas. New offerings, such as family-friendly programming, are designed to engage new audiences and the next generation of preservationists. Visitations have grown by 300 percent since 2016. In 2021 SPMMMV increased accessibility to the murals by offering a 360-degree virtual visitor experience.

In 2009 SPMMMV launched an ambitious, multiyear fundraising effort with the goal of bringing a new level of awareness and appreciation to this unique treasure by fully restoring all 25 murals and permanently illuminating the paintings. As of 2018, with the support of thousands of individuals and private foundations and community organizations, 12 of the 25 murals have been completely conserved and now have dedicated lighting.

Conservation of the Millvale Murals is as unique as the paintings themselves. SPMMMV’s conservation team utilizes cutting-edge techniques to preserve, repair and protect the surface of the paintings. The nanoparticle treatments to stabilize the laster walls behind the murals were among the first in the United States. SPMMMV anticipates a return to conservation no later than spring 2022 following extensive improvements to the church’s roof enclosure and halting destabilizing water infiltration into the walls and the murals. This urgently needed repair is being made possible in part by a $100,000 PHMC Keystone Construction Grant awarded to SPMMMV in June 2021.

Conservation of the Christ on the Battlefield mural.
Society to Preserve the Millvale Murals of Maxo Vanka

For more information on tours, events and volunteer opportunities or to make a gift to help save and share the Vanka murals, visit vankamurals.org.

The Society to Preserve the Millvale Murals of Maxo Vanka recently received a Community Initiative Award, presented by the Pennsylvania State Historic Preservation Office (PA SHPO). The awards — a program of PA SHPO’s #PreservationHappensHere initiative to encourage Pennsylvanians to discover, share and celebrate historic places in their communities — recognize organizations, municipalities, agencies, individuals and others for their preservation successes throughout the commonwealth. For more information, visit phmc.pa.gov/Preservation.

Further Reading

Adamic, Louis. Cradle of Life: The Story of One Man’s Blessings. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1936. / —. My America, 1928-1938. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1938. / Brett, Edward. “A Monument to Catholic Social Justice: The Maxo Vanka Murals of St. Nicholas Croatian Church, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.” American Catholic Studies 122, no. 1 (2011): 101–107. / Leopold, David. The Gift of Sympathy: The Art of Maxo Vanka. Doylestown, PA: James A. Michener Museum, 2001. / Zecker, Robert M. “‘It Was Our Parish, After All’: Immigrants and the Catholic Church. Pennsylvania Legacies 15, no. 2 (Fall 2015): 26-31.

The author and editor wish to acknowledge Anna Doering, executive director of the Society to Preserve the Millvale Murals of Maxo Vanka, for providing helpful information and photographs of the murals for this article.

Sylvia Rhor Samaniego is the director and curator of the University Art Gallery at the University of Pittsburgh, where she earned a Ph.D. in the history of art. She is also lead curator of the Maxo Vanka Collection and is a specialist in mural painting in the United States, including the historic mural collection of Chicago Public Schools and radical murals in Pittsburgh. She is currently researching the intersection of labor, immigration and politics in Pittsburgh’s murals of the 1930s, with special emphasis on Vanka’s Millvale Murals.