Since its founding in 1896, the Carnegie International has been integral to Carnegie Museum of Art’s artistic program. Established as one of the earliest recurring international exhibitions of contemporary art, the International has long served as a space where artists, ideas, and publics meet—where the museum tests new ways of thinking about art’s role in the world as it is being made. Across more than a century, each edition has registered its moment, reflecting changing artistic practices as well as shifting social, political, and cultural conditions. The Carnegie International is not only a presentation of art—it is one of the primary ways the museum learns, evolves, and reimagines its responsibilities.
If the word we: 59th Carnegie International emerges at a moment marked by profound social violence, political polarization, and technological alienation. We live in a precarious and compressed time, with information arriving faster than it can be metabolized and with an erosion of trust in shared frameworks of meaning and cultural institutions. Technologies that once promised connection often produce distance of another kind: interaction without reciprocity, visibility without understanding, circulation without care. Under these conditions, what is most at risk is not knowledge but presence—our capacity to remain with one another, to listen and love, and to register what is at stake in shared experience.
This International does not offer resolution or certainty. Instead, it invites complexity. It asks how art might sustain conversation without reducing difference, how it might hold competing histories and perspectives in view, and how it might create space for collective life that does not depend on agreement. A museum cannot repair the social fabric. But it can offer conditions for human presence. It can create encounters that unfold over time. And it can learn from what those encounters make possible.
I invited Ryan Inouye, Danielle A. Jackson, and Liz Park to collaborate on this edition of the Carnegie International because their curatorial practices share a commitment to working in relation—with artists, with ideas, and with one another. They were invited to work both collaboratively and independently. This model is not a consensus model, nor is it one that smooths over difference. The exhibition has taken shape through exchange, friction, and sustained dialogue, reflecting the museum’s broader curatorial commitment to rethinking inherited narratives and remaining open to transformation.
The curators developed a methodology grounded in conversation—with artists, with each other, and with a group of thought partners whose perspectives extend and complicate curatorial authorship. These include writer and translator Haytham el-Wardany, curator and educator kimi hanauer, artist and cultural historian Marianne Nicolson, artist and musician Christian Nyampeta, and artist Haegue Yang. Thought partnership here names a way of working that understands curating as thinking alongside others and remaining accountable to what that thinking produces.
The exhibition takes its title from an essay by el-Wardany, commissioned by the curators as part of their intellectual framework. In that text, the pronoun “we” is approached not as a stable declaration, but as a provisional and fragile space—one shaped by contradiction, translation, and continual re-formation. The conditional “if” keeps the question open.
Across the museum, beyond its walls, and in the pages of the accompanying publication, If the word we brings together more than 60 artists and collectives. Many projects are newly commissioned; others reimagine artistic practices in response to Pittsburgh, its neighborhoods, and the museum’s own spaces. Still others are conceived specifically for the publication itself. Together, they invite us to be in practice with art and with one another.
A defining feature of this International is its extension into the city through presenting partnerships with institutions that anchor Pittsburgh’s cultural life. Projects unfold at the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh, Kamin Science Center, and Mattress Factory—which together form a constellation of cultural sites across the city’s North Side—and at the Thelma Lovette YMCA, a vital civic institution in Pittsburgh’s historic Hill District. These partners are not satellite venues; they are collaborators whose missions, communities, and forms of public engagement shape the work we commission and encounter.
The 59th Carnegie International is presented for the third time by Bank of America, whose sustained commitment to the arts reflects a belief in cultural access and the importance of long-term institutional partnership. The curators’ positions are named in honor of Kathe and Jim Patrinos, whose leadership support has been foundational to this International and the previous edition in 2022.
This exhibition is made possible through the generosity of many individuals, foundations, and corporate supporters who believe in the Carnegie International as a vital public platform for contemporary art. We are deeply grateful for their support, and I encourage you to read about them here.
We welcome you to Carnegie Museum of Art and to Pittsburgh to experience If the word we, and we thank you for being present with the many artists, ideas, and questions it brings into view.
Yours,
Eric Crosby
Henry J. Heinz II Director, Carnegie Museum of Art
Vice President, Carnegie Museums
