Carnegie International Puts Community at the Center — and Tests the Limits of Accessibility
At the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, the 59th Carnegie International is asking visitors to slow down. Titled If the word we, the exhibition is organized around listening, collaboration, and the uneasy work of making a museum feel less like a monument than a shared civic space. Curators Ryan Inouye, Danielle A. Jackson, and Liz Park borrow the title from Egyptian writer Haytham el-Wardany, and the phrase becomes a guiding principle for the show’s structure and mood.
That emphasis is immediately legible in the galleries. Shala Miller’s Flight offers a darkened room where visitors can lie back on a sloped bean bag and watch video overhead. Jasleen Kaur’s Supra creates a carpeted environment in which light through false windows suggests daylight. The effect is immersive, but not in the bombastic sense; these are rooms designed to hold attention, not overwhelm it.
Georges Adéagbo’s Le Socialisme Africain pushes the exhibition’s social logic into sharper relief. For the work, the Benin-born artist gathered objects from Pittsburgh thrift stores, including a “family rules” sign, a painting of African politicians, an April Fools’ Day edition of a local university newspaper, and a bright-yellow Steelers “terrible towel.” The installation is witty, self-aware, and slightly disarming. It also captures one of the exhibition’s central tensions: museums want to be both high-minded and welcoming, but those aims do not always align neatly.
That tension runs through the broader exhibition as well. Compared with 2022’s Is it morning for you yet?, this edition feels more tactile and more intimate, with room-size installations that make the museum’s large spaces seem unexpectedly domestic. RJ Messineo’s colorful abstractions and Reina Sugihara’s foreboding canvases provide quieter painterly pauses, while the show as a whole leans toward enveloping experience rather than confrontation.
The International also extends beyond the Carnegie Museum of Art, with offsite programming at the Mattress Factory, Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh, Kamin Science Center, and Thelma Lovette YMCA. The most striking of those satellite presentations is at the Mattress Factory, where Arturo Kameya and Claudia Martínez Garay occupy an entire annex. Their presence underscores the exhibition’s ambition to move contemporary art into different civic settings, not just museum galleries.
The review’s larger point is clear: If the word we is most persuasive when it treats community as a practice rather than a slogan. In a city where Pennsylvania’s minimum wage is $7.25 an hour, that question of access is not abstract. The exhibition suggests that museums can invite participation, but only if they are willing to reckon with what participation actually costs.
