North America’s Longest-Running Exhibition of International Art Has Landed at the Carnegie Museum
Installation view of Georges Adéagbo, “Le Socialism Africain,” 2001–04, featured in “If the word we,” the 59th Carnegie International at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh. (Photo: Zachary Riggleman)
In 1895, Andrew Carnegie set out to make Pittsburgh “famous for art as it is now for steel.” His solution, which arrived a year later in 1896, was an ingenious—and enduring—one: the Carnegie International. Staged every four years at the Carnegie Museum of Art, the exhibition has become North America’s longest-running showcase of international art, offering a kaleidoscopic glimpse into creative practices around the world. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the 59th edition of the Carnegie International is no exception.
Titled If the word we, this year’s exhibition gathers some 61 artists and collectives from across the globe, spanning countries like Brazil, Benin, China, Indonesia, Lebanon, Peru, Taiwan, and South Africa, among many others. Together, the featured artists consider “we” as their thematic scope, complicating the first-person plural as an “open and evolving proposition,” according to the museum. That sense of porousness complements the exhibition’s various media, which range from painting, photography, and sculpture to installation, video, and theater. Subject matter is equally expansive, largely attending to what the museum describes as “experience, circulation, and worlds in transition.”…