Plus, get a sneak peak of Artist Ginger Takahashi Brooks‘ (pictured above) Carnegie International project. 

Carnegie Museum of Art has announced the full scope of the 59th Carnegie International: a roster of 61 artists and collectives, 36 newly commissioned projects, more than 35 public programs, and partnerships with over 16 organizations across Pittsburgh. The exhibition, titled If the word we, will open May 2, 2026, and remain on view through January 3, 2027.  

What’s the Theme of This Year’s Carnegie International?

The title comes from a commissioned essay by writer Haytham el-Wardany and proposes “we” not as a stable collective but as a space for listening. In a press briefing, curators Ryan Inouye, Danielle A. Jackson, and Liz Park spoke about resisting the pull of a singular theme, emphasizing instead a methodology built through extended exchange with artists and thought partners over several years. 

That emphasis on relation, exchange, and listening is familiar territory for the Carnegie International, which has long framed itself as a platform for expansive inquiry. Carnegie Museum of Art Director Eric Crosby reflected on the exhibition’s origins in 1896, when Andrew Carnegie imagined the museum as a place where an international assembly of contemporary art might serve an educational function. Each International, Crosby noted, opens “onto a changed world,” offering an opportunity to rethink not only what the museum presents, but how it operates.  

Who and What You Can Expect to See at the 59th Carnegie International Exhibition

What distinguishes this edition is not simply its scale—though the numbers are significant—but how insistently the exhibition positions programming as a primary site to produce meaning. The Carnegie International team views programming not as something that will happen around the exhibition’s 247-day run, but as one of the ways the exhibition itself is taking form. 

That framing came into sharp focus during remarks by Dana Bishop-Root, Director of Education and Public Programs, who characterized the museum’s approach as a shift “from the idea that people need the museum to the practice of a museum that needs people.” In this model, publics do not arrive empty-handed; they bring lived experience, research, feeling, and political context into relation with the work on view. “We make meaning together,” Bishop-Root said. 

For the International, Bishop-Root emphasized, this mindset is foundational. They developed the programming alongside curatorial research and artist commissions rather than layered on after the fact. Several of the museum’s core initiatives—including its free outdoor summer series, Inside Out, and its annual film program—are getting a new upgrade through the lens of If the word we. Rather than guiding audiences toward a fixed interpretation, these programs are structured to offer multiple points of entry and return. 

A Look at the Process

The team organized the exhibition programming around a set of frameworks to give the International rhythm over its eight-month run. One strand, ChoreoPublics, focuses on how publics are formed through movement, sound, and participation, rethinking mediation as something embodied and relational rather than instructional. Two others, scores and swells, structure how the exhibition unfolds over time. 

Scores extend artists’ practices into the public realm through prompts that circulate among partner organizations and audiences, forming what Bishop-Root described as an “ungovernable curriculum.” Swells mark periods of heightened activity—opening weekend in May, a performance-centered moment in August, and a fall convergence around the Pittsburgh Art Book Fair—designed to “give national and international visitors clear moments to travel to Pittsburgh for deeper engagement, and invite our local public to return to the exhibition and our partner sites again and again.” Together, these approaches frame programming as a key site of experimentation in this edition of the International. 

Interweaving Into Pittsburgh’s Landscape

This emphasis on repetition, return, and duration aligns with the curators’ description of the International as a living archive rather than a fixed statement. Many participating artists work through performance, sound, immersion, and collective practice, and several projects will unfold over time rather than presenting as completed objects. Offsite works at four partner institutions across the city—The Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh, Mattress Factory, the Kamin Science Center, and Thelma Lovette YMCA—will further extend the exhibition’s footprint into Pittsburgh’s social and institutional fabric.  

At the same time, the museum’s language invites reflection on how ideas like openness and collaboration take shape in practice. These terms carry different meanings depending on how people enact them, and their implications often emerge over time. The curators spoke frequently about listening as a guiding principle, underscoring a desire to remain responsive as projects develop. In that light, If the word we frames the museum as a space for gathering, learning, and shared responsibility. Whether that orientation yields clarity or raises new questions will become clearer as these structures appear over time. 

What’s the Point of it All?

The 59th Carnegie International is the newest edition of an exhibition that has historically sparked debate about institutional responsibility and curatorial authority. As this iteration arrives, it has set its orientation toward relation: between artists and place, between publics and institutions, between process and outcome. 

What is clear from the announcement is that the museum is investing heavily in programming as a form of cultural labor rather than supplementary service. “Collective experience” is positioned as a site where the exhibition’s questions are contested and lived. The International’s shape will not arrive all at once. It will gather through workshops, performances, publications, and encounters that stretch across the city and the calendar. 

For audiences, the exhibition emphasizes ways of engaging that extend beyond a single visit; it may be less something to see than something to move with. For the institution, it sets a high bar: to ensure that the values articulated—listening, collaboration, shared responsibility—are borne out in form and practice alike. In that sense, If the word we does not propose an answer so much as a grammar shaped one shaped by relation, proximity, and the difficulty of speaking collectively. 

Story by Shawn Simmons
Photography by Laura Petrilla

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