Jonathan González: Carnegie Mellon University School of Art Visiting Artist Lecture Series

Co-presented by Carnegie Museum of Art and the CMU School of Art

Join us for an evening with artist Jonathan González as they share an in-depth look at their practice and the works featured in If the word we, 59th Carnegie International. This lecture is free and open to the public.

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The Strikebreakers

The Strikebreakers is a new site-specific, four-hour performance conceived for the Grand Staircase of Carnegie Museum of Art. Performed by five dancers over five consecutive days, the work unfolds as a slow transformation of bodies, relationships, and collective attention, using the museum’s architecture as both stage and collaborator.

Drawing its title from the complicated history of labor, industry, and Western Pennsylvania, The Strikebreakers does not seek to reenact a historical event. Instead, it approaches the figure of the worker as a choreographic proposition: a body shaped by repetition, endurance, care, fatigue, solidarity, and the continual negotiation between individual agency and collective responsibility. Historical archives surrounding labor movements and Black social life circulate throughout the work not as illustrations, but as conditions that quietly inform its movement, rhythm, and atmosphere. The performance is less concerned with representing history than with asking how history continues to move through bodies in the present. The title also resonates with the legacy of the 1892 Homestead Strike and the histories of labor surrounding Andrew Carnegie’s industrial empire, while opening the work toward broader questions of collective action and social choreography.

About the Artist

Jonathan González (b. 1988, Queens, NY; lives in New York, NY) is an interdisciplinary artist whose work spans choreography, sound, image, writing, video, and collective practice. Their artistic research engages themes of memory, Black geographies, and African diasporic temporalities, often through site-specific and durational performance. By combining movement, sound, and image, González creates works that explore embodiment as both a record of history and a rehearsal for the future. González has presented work nationally at major institutions, including Spectral Dances (American Academy of Arts and Letters, 2024), a durational performance and sonic installation, and perejil (Crystal Bridges Museum of Art / The Momentary, 2022), a performance and video installation presented in the exhibition Entre / Between. Their writing extends their choreographic and visual investigations, with a forthcoming book, Ways to Move: Black Insurgent Grammars, to be published by Ugly Duckling Presse in 2025. González is the recipient of major awards, including the Herb Alpert Award in the Arts (Dance, 2024), the MAP Fund (2024), and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists (Performance Art / Theater, 2019). Their practice foregrounds hybridity and collaboration, positioning collective action as both an artistic method and a social intervention.

Finding Kresge Theatre

Kresge Theatre is located in the College of Fine Arts building on the south end of CMU’s campus (near the Hunt Library). To find the theatre, enter the College of Fine Arts building from the west (main) entrance closest to the College of Fine Arts Lawn. Street parking is available along Frew and Tech streets or in CMU’s East Campus Garage.

About If the word we, 59th Carnegie International

Organized every four years by Carnegie Museum of Art, the Carnegie International is the longest-running exhibition of international art in North America. The 59th edition is the most collaborative and far-reaching to date — a clear expression of the museum’s founding commitment to the art and artists of our time, at once grounded in our locality and extending globally.

Titled If the word we, the 59th Carnegie International considers the first-person plural as an open and evolving proposition — one shaped by listening, translation, and transformation — bringing together artistic practices that engage shared experience, circulation, and worlds in transition. Drawing from a commissioned catalogue essay by writer Haytham el-Wardany, the exhibition approaches “we” not as a unified subject but as a complex and porous position, attentive to contradiction and change. Across a wide range of media, from painting, photography, and sculpture, to installation, video, performance, and theater, participating artists traverse cultural, political, intellectual, and spiritual geographies that extend beyond national boundaries. The projects emerge through everyday acts, materials, and environments, offering spatially expansive portraits of collective life in the present.

About the Visiting Artist Lecture Series

The Carnegie Mellon School of Art Lecture Series is made possible in part by Elizabeth (Thompson) and Thomas M. Cox (A’29) Distinguished Artists Funds, Robert L. Lepper Distinguished Lecture in Creative Inquiry, and Orville M. Winsand Lecture for Critical Studies.

Carnegie Mellon makes every effort to provide accessible facilities and programs for individuals with disabilities. This publication can be made available in an alternate format upon request. For accommodations, contact the School of Art at schoolofart@cmu.edu or 412.268.2409. Lecture and event details are subject to change or cancellation.