Every four years, the Carnegie International asks Pittsburgh to look outward and inward at the same time. Since its founding in 1896, when Andrew Carnegie imagined his new museum as a place that would “bring the world” to the city, the exhibition has carried the weight of that complicated promise. What does it mean to bring the world to Pittsburgh now, when the world is already present in the city’s intertwined histories of labor, migration, displacement, and cultural exchange? And how does the International continue, question, or rework that legacy?
All About The 59th Carnegie International
Those questions come back into view as Carnegie Museum of Art announces the first 14 artists to debut new commissions for the 59th Carnegie International, running May 2, 2026 through January 3, 2027. The exhibition will span the museum and extend to partner institutions on Pittsburgh’s North Side, including Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh, Kamin Science Center, and Mattress Factory. Organized by curators Ryan Inouye, Danielle A. Jackson, and Liz Park, this edition promises to be “the most collaborative and far-reaching to date,” according to Carnegie Museum of Art Director Eric Crosby.
Several of the newly announced commissions will take place offsite: At the Kamin Science Center’s Buhl Planetarium and Observatory, Torkwase Dyson will premiere an immersive animation tracing ecological and political forces beginning on the seabeds of the Caribbean, paired with an installation at Carnegie Museum of Art. At the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh, Sanchayan Ghosh will collaborate with community partners on workshops exploring the idea of home, culminating in a long-term outdoor installation. At the Mattress Factory, Arturo Kameya and Claudia Martínez Garay will create a site-specific installation merging architectural and symbolic forms drawn from Andean visual traditions. In collaboration with the Thelma Lovette YMCA in Pittsburgh’s Hill District, Brooke O’Harra will develop a process-based project with museum docents and present Be Holding, created with poet Ross Gay, composer Tyshawn Sorey, and the ensemble Yarn/Wire, during opening weekend.
Commissions to the Grounds of Carnegie Museum of Art
The remaining commissions will unfold on the grounds of Carnegie Museum of Art, extending beyond gallery walls. Alia Farid will work with Pittsburgh-based Hellbender Vinyl to press a record made from discarded water bottles, incorporating field recordings gathered across the region. The record will anchor an outdoor sound installation programmed to play on a schedule aligned with Shatt Al Arab time, weaving another place’s rhythm into Pittsburgh’s own. Ginger Brooks Takahashi will grow a garden of perilla plants on the museum’s grounds, inviting visitors into scent, memory, and seasonal change. Shala Miller (also known as Freddie June) will construct an intimate environment examining grief and flight, periodically activated by live performance.
Jonathan González will stage a durational performance exploring shared movement vocabularies of steelwork and dance to consider how labor forms interdependent, embodied relations. G. Peter Jemison will present new paintings alongside works by seven Haudenosaunee artists transported in his cargo van, an echo of a traveling exhibition he organized in 1975. Eric Gyamfi will exhibit cameras made from Ghanaian plant materials, reimagining photography through local ecologies. Liz Johnson Artur will present photographs from her decades-long archive documenting Black life across continents, attentive to intimacy and everyday presence.
Providing a New Adventure for All
Two additional projects will restructure how visitors experience the museum itself. Cinthia Marcelle will undertake an architectural intervention that alters how audiences navigate the museum. The Sogetsu Foundation will present a large-scale ikebana installation alongside works by founder Sofu Teshigahara, foregrounding the school’s international network.
These works do not resolve into a single theme. Crosby emphasizes that the International is not to declare what matters now, but to register how artists are working, sensing, and making meaning within the present. This reflects his broader position: that seeking to prove a museum’s “relevance” can reduce art to messaging, rather than allowing it to open forms of relation and thinking that exceed the immediate.
What it All Stands For
Because collaboration is not inherently radical, that sounds like a soothing line of thought in these strained times. However, while collaboration can redistribute power, it can also diffuse responsibility to the point that no clear commitments are made. The museum’s language leans into openness, but openness without articulation can function as a buffer that prevents the institution from taking positions that might invite disagreement. The International arrives, then, at a delicate point where the desire to welcome broad publics intersects with the need to claim a point of view and foster constructive dialogue around it. How the exhibition negotiates that tension will shape not only the experience of these commissions, but the role the International imagines for itself in the city and beyond.
The 58th Carnegie International sparked debate about institutional responsibility. The 59th appears poised to foreground relation: between artists and place, between materials and histories, between audiences and the conditions of encounter. The shape of this exhibition will cohere gradually, across workshops, gardens, sound, and the distances between places. Over the next 14 months, we’ll have the chance to watch these projects and the institution that is framing them take shape. What questions will be asked? What questions will be answered? More to come.
Story by Shawn Simmons
Photo Courtesy of Carnegie Museum of Art
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