Experience our galleries of modern and contemporary art.
Crossroads mines our collection for stories that resonate today by highlighting the critical role of the artist in everyday life. These postwar and contemporary galleries place the work of artists at the intersection of history and society. This installation also features dozens of rarely and never-before-shown works from our collection, finding pockets of depth, diversity, and eccentricities, organized in a series of “chapters.”
Exhibition Chapters
A New Horizon
A shifting global order following World War II and new artistic freedoms prompted artists of the 1950s to respond with innovative forms of abstraction in painting and sculpture.
Call of the Wild
In the late 1940s, a loose-knit band of Northern European painters and poets called CoBrA (shorthand for Copenhagen, Brussels, Amsterdam) experimented with art that was mischievous, playful, and irreverent. The gallery features selections from our extensive CoBrA collection.
More Than Minimal
Though Minimalist works of the 1960s and 1970s may seem cold and impersonal, behind each is a story of touch, perception, and lived experience, lending a human dimension to otherwise simplified forms.
Night Poetry
Borrowing its title from a 1962 painting by the Pittsburgh-born artist Raymond Saunders, this dreamlike gallery summons rarely seen works from the darker recesses of the collection.
Artists’ Cinema
Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the museum served as a hub for a vibrant local film community. This gallery features a rotating program of important and under-recognized works from the museum’s collection.
Less Than Half the Picture
The turmoil of the 1980s prompted widespread debate about the value and role of art in society. A new generation of artists embraced politically charged ways of working in response to the most vital issues of the day.
The Persistence of Painting
From the rise of the Internet to the ubiquity of digital cameras, today’s complex visual environment has pushed a centuries-old medium in unpredictable directions.
Free Radicals
How do artists locate themselves in our complex world? How do they redress historical omissions? How do they embody forms of resistance and protest? And how do they challenge tradition and the status quo?
Bruce Conner’s Crossroads
Crossroads takes its title from Bruce Conner’s 1976 film, a hypnotic collage of atomic bomb blasts at Bikini Atoll.
Crossroads is organized by Eric Crosby, Henry J. Heinz II Director, Carnegie Museum of Art and Vice President, Carnegie Museum of Pittsburgh.
