In November of 2009, Linda James, assistant professor of art history, was running a show of student pieces in the Nohr Gallery in Ullsvik Hall. She found something unexpected in the storage room. “I went in there, and I had been told there was nothing of value,” James said. “I have a good eye, and I saw works that were obviously of value.”

Specifically, James discovered a print done by the Belgian Expressionist James Ensor in 1888. “He was an early modern art expressionist, within early European modern art,” said James. “He’s in all of the art history books.”

James said she started pulling back more pieces and discovered four or five highly valuable pieces, including prints from American abstract artist Robert Motherwell, a fellow member of the New York School with Jackson Pollock.

“At this point, I was incensed,” James recalled. James explained that the art had not been inventoried since the 1980s, and much of it had been lost to institutional memory.

The university tasked James with addressing the issue by conducting a campus-wide inventory of all pieces of art owned by, or donated to, UW-P. James used a grant provided by the university to hire four interns over the summer of 2010 to complete the task. “We spent several long days going through the archives on campus and taking pictures and recording information about the size, artist’s title, year created, all that information about each work,” said Katharine Caywood, one of the interns that worked on the project. “It was tedious at times but also rewarding when we found something surprising.”

Together, the team cataloged some 772 total works of art: 660 prints and drawings, 55 paintings, 20 works of sculpture, and 37 various other works, including textiles and ceramics. 412 of the pieces located were definitively determined to be a gift from the Graf collection, two-thirds of that coming from Christopher and Janet Graf. According to documents provided by James, “the Grafs gave the vast majority of the prints in the permanent collection to UW-P between 1984 and 1986. [Christopher] Graf has continued periodic and valuable donations of art to the campus after . . . 1999.”

A conservative estimate of the collection’s total value lies between $500,000 and $600,000. The collection includes works from historically significant artists such as Paul Gauguin, Georges Rouault, Christo, Charles-Francois Daubigny, and the previously mentioned Motherwell pieces.

With the inventory of the university’s artwork complete, James is now taking steps to ensure the collection’s secure and safe storage and eventual display around campus. For now, James is focused on providing proper framing; she noted that no more than ten percent of the collection is currently framed. “To frame a piece properly, which means it is of archival quality and retains the integrity of the work with backing, matting, glass, wood or metal being completely inert [against the work],” comes at a cost of 500-1500 dollars per piece, James said.

James is also intent on removing all of the art currently stored in the Nohr Gallery storage closets. The majority of the collection is presently being stored in the secure, climate-controlled archives of the Southwest Wisconsin Room in Ullsvik Hall.

With an eye on the long-term health of the university’s art collection, James has submitted a grant proposal to fund a permanent art collection at UW-P. One of James’ suggested projects is a permanent gallery approximately 200 square feet in size located in the Nohr Gallery to showcase the most impressive and significant works in the collection. Another suggested idea was to undo some of the collection, which could help raise funds to frame and display the remaining works around campus.

Cathy Kutka, assistant director of the Nohr Gallery, said that while the remodeling of Ullsvik has increased foot traffic in the facility, the Gallery’s dual-purpose as a meeting space for the campus has proved to be a challenge. Kutka said that ideally, the installation of a permanent gallery would lead students to have a moment in the gallery in which they are “personally engaged with something that catches their attention as well as ties in with curriculum around campus.”

James said that she hopes that visitors to the gallery would experience “shock and awe.”

“[A permanent gallery] would expand the reputation of the art department,” said Caywood. “To know we have professionals here on campus that can verify the legitimacy of those pieces and be able to put those pieces on display is impressive; the collection is much more extensive than a lot of people realize.”