Carnegie International Turns Pittsburgh Into a Citywide Conversation About History and Repair
The 59th Carnegie International has opened in Pittsburgh with a scale that matches its ambitions. On view through January 3, 2027, the exhibition brings together more than sixty artists and collectives and includes over thirty commissions, making this edition the most expansive in the series’ history.
Curators Ryan Inouye, Danielle A. Jackson, and Liz Park chose the title If the word we from an essay by Egyptian writer Haytham el-Wardany. That choice is more than poetic framing. It signals a curatorial approach built around collective experience, contradiction, and the idea that the world cannot be understood from a single fixed position. The exhibition unfolds across the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Kamin Science Center, the Mattress Factory, and other sites around the city.
Many of the works are site-responsive, and several of the most striking commissions use architecture itself as a medium. Abraham González Pacheco’s Orogenic covers the façade of the Carnegie Museum of Art, turning the building into part of the exhibition’s visual language. Cinthia Marcelle’s Green Hall Annex is among the show’s central works. The Brazilian artist, born in 1974 in Belo Horizonte and based in São Paulo, uses a flat-roofed pavilion and a field of green carpet to reflect on the aftermath of the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol and the January 8, 2023 attacks on federal buildings in Brasília.
Marcelle’s installation is especially precise in the way it layers political history with material evidence. The carpet comes from the same manufacturer that supplied the green flooring removed from Brazil’s government buildings after the attacks. Beneath it, collaged newspaper clippings in English and Portuguese from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, The New York Times, and Brazilian publications create a dense record of how events are reported, translated, and remembered. The work extends Marcelle’s ongoing interest in systems of power and repair, following her 2023 exhibition Blue Hall Annex at Galeria Luisa Strina in São Paulo.
Another newly commissioned project, Dineo Seshee Bopape’s Fiela, fiela (I’ve come to take you home), brings a different register of memory into the exhibition. The South African artist, born in 1981 in Polokwane and based in Johannesburg, has created an immersive multimedia environment that references Yoruba cleansing rituals. Together, these works suggest a broader curatorial argument: that history is not a stable archive, but a set of lived, contested, and spatially embedded experiences.
In Pittsburgh, that argument is being staged not only inside the museum, but across the city itself.
