The title of the 59th Carnegie International feels like a sentence interrupted midway through thought.
If the word we.
It is not even a fully formed question, leave alone a declaration or a promise.
The 59th Carnegie International opened across Pittsburgh earlier this May and runs through Jan. 3, 2027. Organized by Ryan Inouye, Liz Park and Danielle A. Jackson, the Kathe and Jim Patrinos Curators of the 59th Carnegie International, the exhibition opens a grammatical gap and asks the viewer to stand inside it.
Park said the exhibition builds “networks of we-ness rather than fixed positions,” allowing different viewers, artists and histories to complete the phrase differently.
The title comes from a commissioned essay by Egyptian writer Haytham el-Wardany, one of the exhibition’s thought partners. “What if the word we becomes a space for listening?” el-Wardany asks. “We,” the curators write, “is a complex and heterogenous position from where the three of us navigate contradictions of life while being receptive to the frequencies of our surroundings.”
The curators recognized the phrase as “the spirit of the exhibition” they were building. They clipped the “what,” shortened the phrase and arrived at If the word we.
“What if the word we” frames a question. If the word we invites the visitor to complete the sentence,” Park said. The open-endedness makes the visitor “part of the meaning-making process,” and part of “coming together to think about what we mean and what the boundaries of that word can be.”
There is, Park said, “no one primary viewer” for the exhibition. Instead, it asks whether collectivity can exist without collapsing difference into consensus.
“The world has really changed even since 2023,” Park said, referring to the political ruptures, border anxieties and uneven conditions of movement that shaped the exhibition’s development.
The curators openly acknowledge the unequal conditions under which the exhibition was organized. “Although travel restrictions of one kind had lifted in the aftermath of a global pandemic,” they write, “movement around the world—which was never equally granted to begin with—increasingly became fraught and controlled, subject to political ruptures and turmoil.”
They also acknowledge their own position directly: “We, as curators with access and resources, crossed thresholds to meet artists and organizers less mobile while rhetoric of security concealed mass destruction and displacement on the ground.”
That admission cuts directly into the history of the Carnegie International.
In 1895, Andrew Carnegie, the Scotland-born steel industrialist and philanthropist, founded the Carnegie Institute, laying the foundation for what became the four Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh. His ambition was explicit: to make Pittsburgh “as famous for art as it is now for steel.” In 1896, he established an annual exhibition of art from which the museum would purchase prizewinners and key works to build its collection. That exhibition became the Carnegie International, the longest-running North American exhibition of international contemporary art, second globally only to the Venice Biennale.
The International placed Pittsburgh inside a global conversation about taste, modernity and power.
Early editions largely featured American and Western European artists, while later iterations shifted repeatedly in structure and philosophy: from nationality-based displays to thematic surveys, from prizes to featured-artist models, and eventually into the contemporary triennial format that exists today.
If the word we feels like an exhibition testing the assumptions the International once embodied. What does a survey exhibition do when the world it surveys cannot be understood “from a single point of view or universal framework,” as the curators write?
“Intellectual rigor can come in many forms,” Park said. “It doesn’t necessarily have to feel like an armor.”
To be rigorous, Inouye suggested, can mean remaining porous. “You don’t have to maintain a fixed position,” Inouye said. “When you try to make an argument, we dig deeper into our established position. What we are proposing is something that’s a little more fluid, where the space of listening is a space where people can transform.”
Inouye said the three-person curatorial structure shaped the exhibition’s method. “It’s a moment where we need to bring rigor to forming community and working together.” Rather than arriving at a “definitive, singular theme,” the curators kept the framework open, trusting that dialogue, research and the material presence of the works would create coherence.
The “we” also shaped how the exhibition worked beyond the museum itself.
“What if we brought the International to people where they are?” Inouye said.
At the Thelma Lovette YMCA, for example, the exhibition made tickets available to members for a performance event, extending the International toward audiences who may never otherwise enter the museum.
The curators were also thinking, Park said, about “the elitism of art” and “our institutions.” The idea of “we,” even before the title arrived, required thinking about “the worlds that we come from instead of particular countries.”
Park said “country” is a rigid and politicized way of thinking about the international. “A person comes from more than a country. A community may span borders. A material form may travel across histories.”
“Artistic imagination does not reside only in monumental artworks or elite cultural forms,” Inouye said. “It can exist in flowers, weaving traditions, textiles and ordinary domestic objects, even salt and pepper shakers.”
The curators tried to avoid organizing the show around broad theoretical labels. They did not, Park said, spend the process speaking in terms like “postcolonialism,” though colonial histories and national structures remain unavoidable presences. “We tried to stay away from these isms,” Park said, “and really work with life and the shape that life took in different places.”
Take Silät, a weaving collective of more than 100 women in northern Argentina. Their community exists both inside and beyond the nation-state. The question, for the curators, became how to think about a world in which both realities can exist at once: belonging to Argentina while also belonging to an autonomous Indigenous community that exceeds Argentina’s borders.
Their installation, Inouye said, proposes “to make a forest if we dance.”
Another example is Sofu Teshigahara and the Sogetsu Foundation. Teshigahara founded the Sogetsu School of Ikebana in 1927, transforming flower arrangement through a modernist, international artistic imagination. Inouye noted that his work was already in dialogue with international practitioners before World War II. After the war, he founded an art center that hosted John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg and Merce Cunningham. Andy Warhol visited him in Tokyo, and a Polaroid of Teshigahara remains in The Andy Warhol Museum archives.
“It’s a Japanese practice, but it’s completely international, too,” Inouye said.
A third example is the work involving Brazil’s Green Hall Annex. Park said the green carpet in Brasília’s capital building is immediately recognizable in Brazil as the carpet of a governmental foyer used for press conferences and legislative activity. Bringing that carpet into the exhibition creates a direct connection to media, current events and public forums.
For Brazilian viewers, Park said, the carpet immediately signals a public forum. In the exhibition, viewers stand beneath all of it: beneath news, politics, current events and the weight of public discourse.The question becomes what it means “to be the ones below,” together under a floor, not at the edges but in the center of the hall.
If the word we treats “international” less as a map of countries than as a set of relationships, histories, materials and positions.
Few artists in the exhibition embody those tensions more sharply than Walter Scott.
Scott, a Mohawk artist from Kahnawà:ke, is best known for Wendy, his long-running comic series about artists, curators, assistants, writers, collectors, friends and rivals moving through galleries, residencies, openings and emotional collapse. His work is often described as satire, but that word only gets halfway there.
Two new works from Scott, EURO TRASH GIRL and REALITY HAS LESS TO DO WITH ME THAN I THOUGHT, read like the residue of art-world circulation and self-performance: synthetic human hair, clothing, shoes, a travel bag, expired passports, boarding passes, credit cards, phones, beer cans, mirrors and a box.
“The work is semi-autobiographical,” Scott said. “It kind of started in the punk scene where I was and my ambitions as an artist. As I went deeper into the art world, it just sort of naturally became my subject.”
“I’ve been able to write these stories from the inside and satirize it,” he added, “and thankfully not get kicked out of it.”
His comics are funny because they are exact. People say the wrong thing at openings. They overperform politics and obsess about status. They drift through residencies, bad relationships and creative blocks. They speak in the specialized, self-protective language of contemporary art because they are trying to survive inside it.
Beneath the humor is an acute understanding of belonging. Scott’s world is full of people trying to be inside something: a scene, a friendship, an institution, a career, a conversation, a “we.”
The curators describe the exhibition’s 61 artists as making works that “actively configure social life and collective experience that are deeply felt and spatially expansive.” Scott does this through comics, phrases, sculpture and installation.
His contribution also extends into the exhibition catalogue, where his illustrations become part of the printed life of the show. Scott described the work as “a series of vignettes,” following the unstable emotional terrain of artistic life: trying to date someone who does not understand art, struggling to make work, moving through self-doubt and addiction.
“It talks about self-doubt, addiction,” Scott said, “a lot of the things people romanticize about an artist, or the idea of an artist.”
That phrase — “the idea of an artist” — sits at the core of Scott’s work. He is fascinated by how people become legible as artists, how they perform themselves and how the art world rewards some performances while punishing others.
“There’s a cardboard box in my exhibition and in the comic,” Scott said. “At the very end, she crawls into the box and closes the lid on top.”
In the gallery, the box reappears opened.
“There’s a drawing of her on the wall,” Scott said. “The box is open, so it’s almost like she’s shipped herself to the gallery in a box, and the box is now open, and she’s on display.”
It is a joke, but only barely. The artist ships herself to the institution, becoming cargo, display and participant all at once.
Scott’s interest in circulation and visibility began long before this exhibition. Wendy emerged in 2011 during what he described as a cultural moment dominated by young white urban women.
“I have an Indigenous background. I’m from an Indigenous community,” Scott said. “But at the time, I didn’t feel like anyone would pay attention to my work if it was very forward-facing, an Indigenous project with an Indigenous main character.”
So he made Wendy.
“I wanted to sort of satirize what I was seeing on television,” he said, “while at the same time understanding that people were hungry for that kind of story at the time.”
The series emerged from that Lena Dunham-era millennial cultural landscape, but Scott used that familiarity strategically. He later introduced Winona, Wendy’s Indigenous best friend, first as a side character and later more centrally as the audience expanded.
“I wanted to sort of Trojan Horse her into the series,” Scott said. “That was the necessary tactic because I realized I had an audience and people were paying attention.”
Scott said the cultural landscape has changed since 2011, though not necessarily in simpler ways. “Now, I think things have almost flipped in a way,” he said. “But that offers its own complications, too, where tokenization can be an issue.”
He said audiences can now expect Indigenous artists to produce work “purely about Indigenous issues,” especially trauma and abuse, creating another kind of confinement.
“It’s like a film strip,” Scott said. “It flickers back and forth constantly between me feeling like people expect something of me in one way, and then they expect something of me in another way, and it changes every day.”
Scott sees himself as part of the art world he critiques, aware that the work risks becoming “just bitter” otherwise.
“I think to critique something really well, you have to kind of love it a little,” Scott said. “I don’t think that coming from a place of pure vitriol or cynicism is very productive.”
That tension between critique and attachment runs through If the word we itself. The Carnegie International has historically been tied to permanence and collection-building. Carnegie Museum of Art will continue acquiring works from this edition, and the exhibition still awards the Carnegie Prize and Fine Prize.
Inouye said this year’s International also wanted to make space for more ephemeral forms: performances, encounters and experiences that cannot be permanently collected.
“We’re really proud of bringing this living material and the ephemeral into an exhibition like this,” Inouye said. “We will of course still build the collection from the International, but you can never underestimate how long an experience with an artwork or an exhibition will stay with people and how that’ll shape their experience of the world or their perspective.”
