Inside this hushed cavern of antiquity at Carnegie Museum of Art, plaster replicas of Greek and Roman statues arranged on an upper balcony gaze at the installation featured as part of the 58th Carnegie International.

The stark visual contrast between neoclassical aesthetic and those shimmering balloons is an irresistible, made-for-Instagram moment.

Each balloon is shaped like an English alphabet letter. Titled right?, this installation by Turkish artist Banu Cennetoglu spells out the first 10 articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a 1948 agreement that leaders from hundreds of countries signed three years after World War II ended.

As the balloons deflate—something they are doing far faster than anticipated—visitors can consider what it will take to protect freedom of religious expression, freedom of speech, and freedom from slavery.

“We are surprised by the rate at which these articles are deflating,” says Ryan Inouye, associate curator of the International, who worked with Sohrab Mohebbi, the Kathe and Jim Patrinos Curator of the 58th Carnegie International, curatorial assistant Talia Heiman, and a large team of advisers and associates. 

Inouye notes that some visitors who photographed themselves with the helium-filled balloons, then posted the pictures on social media, were a tad embarrassed after learning of the serious message that underlies the artwork. Kettlebells anchor the balloons to the floor, a visual suggestion that upholding the shiny promise of human rights remains a heavy lift for humanity.

The 58th Carnegie International, which opened September 24 and runs through April 2, 2023, is Pittsburgh’s continuation of a 126-year-old conversation with emerging and well-established artists chosen from all over the globe. Andrew Carnegie, the industrialist and philanthropist, started the exhibition in 1896, and it remains the longest-running North American survey of international contemporary art, second worldwide only to the Venice Biennale, founded in 1895. The museum’s leaders have acquired paintings, sculptures, films, installations, and videos from past shows that have become an important part of the overall collection.

Among the more than 100 participating artists and collectives, 25 are from North America; 6 are from the Caribbean; and 47 are from the Middle East and North Africa.

But this International is more than an effort to highlight the art world’s hottest talents. “This is a show about social movements,” explains Dana Bishop-Root, Carnegie Museum of Art’s director of education and public programs.  

The exhibition showcases artists’ heroic, inventive efforts to archive, record, or reclaim important chunks of history.  One example is the black-and-white photographic collages titled What we choose to not see by Panamanian artist Giana De Dier. These collages reveal the resilient Afro-Caribbean women who, during the early 1900s, disguised themselves as men in order to obtain lucrative, backbreaking work building the Panama Canal.

A Political Exhibition

The International’s title—Is it morning for you yet?—is a query and an invitation. In the Mayan Kaqchikel (pronounced Kak-jackal) language indigenous to Central Guatemala, it is a customary greeting to acknowledge that each person’s internal clock and mood varies. It may be morning for you, but it is likely night for someone else.

Among its varied stories, the art in this profoundly political exhibition highlights the United States’ military intervention in armed conflicts during the 20th and 21st centuries, as well as citizens’ struggles against authoritarian governments throughout the world.

“It is certainly a forum for expression for a lot of artists about what their countries have suffered or are suffering,” says Monica Valley, as she took a docent-led tour of the exhibition in late September. An independent curator and museum educator who has worked at the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Valley spent much of the pandemic working at the Terra Sancta Museum, housed inside a Jerusalem monastery in Israel. She returned to the U.S. in 2022 and lives in downtown Pittsburgh.

The heart of the exhibition, Inouye explains, is the Hall of Sculpture, a hard architectural space filled with artwork that conveys what he calls “resilience and tenderness.”

On large walls at both ends of the hall’s balcony, 10 frescoes comprise Colors of Grey, by one of more than 25 artists specifically commissioned for this International. Thu Van Tran, an artist born during the Vietnam War, used the six colors of the lethal “rainbow herbicides”—known as Agents Orange, Blue, Green, Pink, Purple, and White—that U.S. military troops sprayed over more than 4.5 million acres of Vietnam, contaminating canals, farms, forests, rice paddies, and rivers.

In scale and choice of palette, Colors of Grey may remind viewers of Claude Monet’s water lily paintings, one of which resides in Carnegie Museum of Art’s Scaife Galleries. A gifted gardener, Monet cultivated the plants at his Giverny home in France. Some of Monet’s water lily canvases are on view at the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris, the city where Tran lives.

“It is certainly a forum for expression for a lot of artists about what their countries have suffered or are suffering.”

– Monica Valley, An independent curator and museum educator

All around the Hall of Sculpture’s first floor are haunting images by Hiromi Tsuchida. For more than half of his 82 years, the Japanese photographer has studied the August 8, 1945, bombing of Hiroshima by the U.S. military near the end of World War II.

The artist meticulously documents objects from the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum’s collection. The result is Hiroshima Collection.  One picture shows a torn school uniform worn by Akio Tsukuda, a 13-year-old boy who was doing fire prevention work the day of the bombing. The boy’s father discovered the uniform hanging from a tree branch and kept it; his son’s body was never found.

Hiroshima Collection consists of black-and-white photographs of everyday objects, such as a lunchbox and a pocket watch. The images are composed with a palpable reverence, imbuing each quotidian item with the sacred rarity of a saint’s relic.

Ed Horvat, who lives in Hopwood, Fayette County, visited the 58th International exhibition twice, spending three hours on his first visit. Horvat says he found the exhibition “heavy,” but was nevertheless compelled to return.

“It’s moving in its intensity,” Horvat says, adding that the pictures are so powerful, political, and personal that for a while they became “a repetitive slideshow in his brain.”

Beauty on Barkcloth

But amid the dark themes there is also light. The Heinz Galleries hold astonishingly vivid, richly textured paintings that appear to be made of shells. Instead, the medium is colorful recycled paper rolled into tiny handmade beads that are sewn onto barkcloth. Think of it as pointillism with paper dots.

The recycled paper folded into beads is gathered from many sources, including magazines, retired school textbooks, and political campaign flyers. The Uganda-born artist, Sanaa Gateja, a trained jeweler, is called the “Bead King” in Kampala, Uganda, where he works with a group of women who assist him and earn income from their painstaking artistic practice.

A different type of beauty—the triumph of indomitable human beings—radiates from color photographs made by LaToya Ruby Frazier, a Braddock, Pennsylvania, native who spent three months of 2021 in Baltimore, Maryland. There, Frazier recorded hours long interviews with 33 community health workers, the front-line foot soldiers who rolled out the COVID-19 vaccine to some of Baltimore’s most vulnerable residents. Frazier photographed each of the community health workers in a place they chose that was meaningful to them, and also taught them to photograph themselves. Her installation earned her the International’s top award, the Carnegie Prize.

A corps of patient advocates who have their neighbors’ trust, the community health workers documented in Frazier’s work educated people about COVID’s threats to public health and helped them navigate the healthcare system to find the right treatment. Beside each picture is the story of what motivated the person featured, plus their recounting of experiences as liaisons with faith leaders, doctors, and government officials. The 36 portraits, attached to 9-foot-tall intravenous poles, stand 6 feet apart, with 18 portraits by Frazier hanging on the front and 18 taken by the community health workers themselves on the back. A black-and-white portrait of Tiffany Scott, the first certified community health worker in Maryland, conveys a palpable mixture of a pioneer’s pride and a superhero’s strength. Scott connected Frazier with other community health workers and also gave her a tour of Baltimore.

Frazier calls this combination of art, archive, history, and installation More Than Conquerors: A Monument for Community Health Workers of Baltimore, Maryland. The artist hopes the artwork will aid community health workers in obtaining better pay and healthcare benefits.

Michele Borkoski, who lives in Oakdale, admires the humanity of Frazier’s work.

“I think that’s really involving the community in the art world,” says Borkoski, a regular patron of previous Carnegie Internationals, as she studied Frazier’s portraits during a visit in early October.

Artists’ choices of medium, materials, and style often reflect the aesthetic and cultural tenor of their times. Several examples are outside the museum’s front entrance on Forbes Avenue. A 40-foot-tall sculpture, Carnegie, was forged from four panels of COR-TEN steel by Richard Serra for the 1985 Carnegie International. The sculpture honors Andrew Carnegie’s cultural and philanthropic contributions to Pittsburgh. Like the nearby Cathedral of Learning, a Gothic classroom building on the University of Pittsburgh campus, the Serra sculpture is also an exercise in placemaking.

“I think that’s really involving the community in the art world.”

– Michele Borkoski, Oakdale Resident, on Latoya Ruby Frazier’s portraits of community health workers in Baltimore

“One conceptual, art historical thread through which I think about Richard Serra’s work is how the scale of and material with which he made his sculptures was in conversation with new typologies of architecture that would define the American city in the second half of the 20th century,” Inouye says. “I think of this as the context in which Serra was working.”

Tishan Hsu, who was born in Boston, Massachusetts, made three artworks this year for the International. Two of them, displayed near the Carnegie sculpture, are especially colorful and curvy: car-grass-screen and car-body-screen.   

Hsu has spent more than 40 years thinking about the acceleration of technology and artificial intelligence and how both affect our bodies, behavior, and the environment, Inouye says.

“In Hsu’s work, we have encounters with surfaces, forms, and imagery that we are more used to experiencing on our screens or in the so-called digital domain,” he explains. “But is the digital any less ‘real’ than a street or building when so much digital infrastructure shapes the way we think, live, and relate to one another? Hsu’s work helps me think through such questions about present-day life and our surroundings.”

Hope for peace

Two International installations that are especially striking are Julian Abraham’s OK Studio, 2021 and Dia al-Azzawi’s Ruins of Two Cities: Mosul and Aleppo.

The organic evolution of OK Studio, 2021 by Julian Abraham “Togar” began during the March 2020 lockdown of the COVID-19 pandemic. At the time, he was living in Amsterdam as an artist in residence at the Rijksakademie. He bought a drum, and soon other artists who heard his rhythmic beats joined him. OK Studio, 2021 includes instruments, video, nine automated ocean drums, and gongs.

Witty text paintings on the studio walls are drawn from sonic culture. “You May Say I’m a Drummer, But I’m Not the Only One” sounds like a variation on a line from Imagine, the 1971 song John Lennon wrote as the Vietnam War raged. “You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one,” Lennon sang softly in his understated wish for world peace.

But war remains a constant, and Dia al-Azzawi’s large, bird’s-eye view of Mosul, Iraq, and Aleppo, Syria, shows how these ancient cities have nearly been leveled in recent history.

The artist, who was born in Baghdad and lives in London, cast the three-dimensional model out of polyester resin, calling it Ruins of Two Cities: Mosul and Aleppo. For millennia, Mosul and Aleppo were razed and rebuilt, remaining centers of artistic endeavor, culture, and commerce.

Monica Valley, the independent curator, has visited Aleppo and Mosul, an experience that immediately connected her with al-Azzawi’s portrayal of ancient urban ruins. 

In the Middle East, Valley says, “You are surrounded by ruins. … You can see the hand of time everywhere. And yet people live in ruins, live in walls that are 800 years old, conduct their daily lives, surf the Internet, and talk with their cellphones.”

Valley believes al-Azzawi deliberately made the work large enough to cover nearly the entire floor of a single gallery. 

“He is very clear and very exact about how he lays out the grid of these cities. You can’t escape the details. He’s there. He’s seen it,” Valley says. 

The scale of the work, she adds, “catches your eye. It’s very tactile and it’s something that hooks you, that bird’s-eye view. You have a position of power. He wants you to almost take ownership of it.”

Krista Belle Stewart literally did take ownership of land when her mother, Seraphine, gave her 50 acres in the Okanagan Nation. Stewart, who grew up on a First Nations reservation in Canada, dug up some of the land and carried it around in a suitcase. Her wall mural, titled Eye Eye, features rich tones of ocher, terra cotta, and umber. The massive mural is displayed inside the museum’s fountain entry. Stewart transported the land from her reservation in the form of a tile and mixed it with water to create pigment for the mural—a slow, meditative process.

JJ Potasiewicz lives in Ben Avon and works remotely as a design studio manager for a San Francisco company. He called the 58th Carnegie International “the most international” and the “most transporting” art show he has seen in quite awhile.  

A notable feature of the 58th International is how far beyond U.S. borders it reached in choosing the organizers of the exhibition. Sohrab Mohebbi is the first person from a West Asian nation to organize a Carnegie International.

Now director of SculptureCenter in Long Island City, New York, Mohebbi, who was born in Iran and is now a U.S. citizen, studied photography at Tehran Art University, then curatorial studies at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York.

Mohebbi hopes that visitors to this exhibition will realize that one of the show’s messages is that, “trying to understand others and approach other cultures” is also a way of crossing borders.

The 58th Carnegie International, presented by Bank of America, is made possible by leadership support from Kathe and Jim Patrinos.

Major support is provided by the Carnegie International Endowment, The Fine Foundation, the Jill and Peter Kraus Endowment for Contemporary Art, and the Carnegie Luminaries. Significant support is provided by Teiger Foundation, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, The Susan J. and Martin G. McGuinn Exhibition Fund, Henry L. Hillman Foundation, and the Keystone Members of the Carnegie International. The 58th Carnegie International has been made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

This project is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts. Generous support is provided by the The Heinz Endowments, the Heinz Family Foundation, the Louisa S. Rosenthal Family Fund, and the Friends of the Carnegie International.

Additional support is provided by the Akers Gerber Foundation, Carnegie Mellon University School of Art, Buchanan Ingersoll and Rooney, Highmark Blue Cross Blue Shield and Allegheny Health Network, NOVA Chemicals, Sotheby’s, Fort Pitt Capital, the Henry Moore Foundation, Advanced Auto Parts, Giant Eagle Foundation, UPMC and UPMC Health Plan, the Japan Foundation, the Fans of the Carnegie International, and the Carnegie Collective.

This program is supported as part of the Dutch Culture USA program by the Consulate General of the Netherlands in New York. This exhibition is supported by Etant donnés Contemporary Art, a program from Villa Albertine and FACE Foundation, in partnership with the French Embassy of the United States.

The post A Weighty Conversation appeared first on Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh.

It could just be an odd kind of Good-Morning greeting: Has your day begun? Shrugged off the cobwebs? First cup of coffee? But when posed by the artist Édgar Calel, who is of Mayan descent, to the curators of the upcoming 58th Carnegie International, this question became about far more than waking up. It was about recognizing the differences in our worldviews. Or, to use a word that crops up time and again regarding the more than 150 artists and other participants in this year’s Carnegie International, the differences in our cosmologies—the parallel contexts with which we understand the world. It’s as if to say, in the world you inhabit, what is the truth?

And so it was that the 58th Carnegie International would borrow the Mayan Kaqchikel expression “Is it morning for you yet?” as its title. For Sohrab Mohebbi, the Kathe and Jim Patrinos Curator of the 58th Carnegie International, it reinforced a meaning of the word “international” as not just about bringing a broad range of nationalities to Pittsburgh but an array of perspectives as well.

Installation view of Rafael Domenech, Dividing an edge from an ever (pavilion for Sarduy) at Carnegie Museum of Art, 2022

“I really like that word ‘perspective,’” says Mohebbi, “because that’s the challenge of how to make international shows work—how can you actually try to introduce different perspectives? It’s easy to talk about it, but you can end up putting yourself in; speaking, looking, seeing on behalf of others. So, we tried to account for many different points of view, and to let things follow the lead of the artwork.”

An artist such as Calel is a good example. A member of the Kaqchikel, an Indigenous Mayan people of present-day Guatemala, his work explores his culture’s understanding of memory, spirituality, and language through artworks stemming from ritual and tradition. That exploration takes the form of performance, installation, drawing—many media, one mission.

“Each artist through their work invites us to see their history, their roots, and their vision of the world,” says Calel. “I feel honored to share, through art, a part of that millenary heritage that our grandmothers and grandfathers left sown in our memory and in the Indigenous Maya Kaqchikel territory.”

Sown in our memory. It’s a phrase that could be used by many of the artists in this International because they tell stories of personal histories, and art histories, that in many cases exist not within but parallel to the dominant narrative we’re told; they have battled simply to exist. In the 58th Carnegie International, Is it morning for you yet?, these artworks join together to ask seismic questions, not just of history or art but also of the way we understand being in the world. And they ask not just that we glimpse another’s artwork but also another’s cosmology.

Griya Seni Hj. Kustiyah Edhi Sunarso, Torso, 1960

Balancing Global and Local

For more than 125 years, the Carnegie International has been a signal event for the art world. Mohebbi, associate curator Ryan Inouye, and curatorial assistant Talia Heiman—plus a large team of advisers and associates—are the latest to attempt the International’s great balancing act: to be meaningful to both the global art community and to the people of Pittsburgh.

The International’s 21st-century editions have been a process of finding the right fit. For some years, like in 2004, the International has leaned towards bringing the big names of the art world to Pittsburgh—like Jeremy Deller, Maurizio Cattelan, and Francis Alÿs. The 2013 Carnegie International pivoted toward a concept—about the politics of “play”—which allowed for a bigger influx of emerging names and odd juxtapositions. Assembled for the first time by a team, it extended its reach beyond the museum, with aspects of its work moving into other Pittsburgh neighborhoods.

“Each artist through their work invites us to see their history, their roots, and their vision of the world.” – artist Édgar Calel

The 2022 exhibition, which runs at Carnegie Museum of Art from Sept. 24 to April 2, 2023, is a show strongly rooted in concept, which subtly reveals another world to its audiences—a world that has existed beside us for decades, if often hidden or obscured by history.

As in the past, the 58th Carnegie International will showcase the work of many young and emerging artists, such as Aziz Hazara, Dala Nasser, and Ali Eyal. But by including artists both established and lesser known from previous generations—both through their own work, and as collected by institutions, estates, and fellow artists—this exhibition also stretches back to include works created through much of the International’s history, starting with 1945, the beginning of both American geopolitical dominance and, some would say, contemporary art. The question is, whose idea of contemporary art begins there? And what other aesthetics and worldviews survived in parallel through it all?

Colonialism and Revolution

In 1950s and ’60s Indonesia, the painter Kustiyah made images of everyday life dramatized with rough lines and dark, earthy, yet pulsating colors. She was painting a revolution—Indonesian independence—and she was of the people. In fact, she was part of a group of artists known as the Pelukis Rakyat, the “People’s Painters.” But despite living well into the 21st century, today she is little known, even in her own nation.

Dogma Collection, Untitled propaganda poster (A-side), ca. 1965-75, The Private Dogma Collection (English translation: Clasp the gun with faith, for our beloved South)

Dogma Collection, Untitled propaganda poster (B-side), ca. 1965-75, The Private Dogma Collection

Hyphen, a group of young Indonesian artists, curators, and historians that came together in 2011, is trying to change that with their collection As If There Is No Sun—which will be shown as part of the 58th Carnegie International. Its title is taken from a 1957 critique of the Pelukis Rakyat’s work.

“The full sentence [of the critique] was, ‘The paintings exhibited here made it feel as if there is no sun in Indonesia,’” says Grace Samboh, one of the founders of Hyphen. “Indeed, a certain kind of darkness, cloud, or even eeriness are vivid in the so-called ‘revolutionary painters’ generation; as if to paint the ray of sun and its warmth would exoticize their subject matter, the common people—[which is] what they were fighting against with the colonial painters.”

As Kustiyah and the other like-minded artists in As If There Is No Sun were emerging from revolutionary Indonesia, artists in their Southeast Asia neighbor, Vietnam, were entering into a similarly dangerous period. Võ An Khánh is an octogenarian photographer who worked for the Northern Vietnamese Communist Army’s Office of Entertainment in the 1960s and ‘70s, following guerrilla forces through combat. Without access to high-speed film, Khánh took to restaging moments he saw in action, resulting in fantastically eerie, yet enduringly human images of war from a vantage not frequently seen in America.

Other work from wartime Vietnam is included in the 58th Carnegie International as well. Works saved by the Dogma Collection include Vietnamese propaganda posters full of soldiers and guns, repurposed by artists in the same period. With a paper shortage, visual artists used the backs of these posters for their classroom life-drawing exercises, resulting in supple, tender nude figures drawn on the flipside of the harsher wartime propaganda images. Thanks to Dogma Collection, these anonymous artists’ drawings survive—hidden, literally—behind the images of war.

“So what you get is, on one side, the body in service of ideology, and on the other side, the body free from that and in the service of the imagination of the artist,” Mohebbi explains. “That was what was particularly interesting for us; in fact, it almost defined us.”

Human, aesthetic responses that exist beside, not simply within, the ongoing war effort helped define another question for Mohebbi: How to make an exhibition that follows America and the West’s global impact of the past 80 years, but that isn’t only about that?

“How can we make it so that it’s not always about artwork in conversation with that American center?” Mohebbi says. “We wanted to acknowledge that, in all of these places impacted by U.S. geopolitical decisions, there have been aesthetic traditions and artistic practices that resist, and survive, and continue.”

Liberating Art from Museums

A number of focus areas become apparent when looking over the vast array of artists involved in this year’s International, including geographic locations and, importantly, existing artists’ collections.

Central and South America are well represented, with contributions such as those from the Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende—a Chilean collection of artist-donated works kept secret during President Augusto Pinochet’s 1970s regime—and from Mexico City’s 1980s revolutionary art and poetry group Colectivo 3, among many others.

There are historical collections and documentation of work from Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa that have rarely been seen in America, and the well-known Iranian artist Fereydoun Ave contributes work from his vast personal collection. Meanwhile, young Iraqi artists such as Ali Eyal and Mohammed Sami provide a new vision of themselves and their region.

The exhibition’s American contributors come largely from situations not too dissimilar from their far-flung colleagues: communities that, through prejudice, poverty, and, particularly for America, a history of incarceration, have been left out of the national narrative.

James “Yaya” Hough, a Gift to the Hill District, 2021-2022

James “Yaya” Hough is a Pittsburgh-born artist who, after being convicted of murder at the age of 17, began making drawings and large-scale mural art while serving a life-without-parole sentence in prison. Thanks to a redemptive change in law regarding such sentences for minors, Hough earned his release in 2019 after having served 27 years. He was immediately named the inaugural artist-in-residence for the district attorney’s office in Philadelphia, and in 2020 had his first museum exhibition in New York City. For the 58th Carnegie International, Hough worked with the community he was brought up in to make a mural on the side of a Hill District home: A Gift to the Hill District. The mural on Centre Avenue was unveiled during a community celebration on July 30.

“I was very specific about wanting to do something outside the museum, and to do something in the community,” says Hough. “Public art is about how communities see themselves—it’s an important and powerful tool that we as human beings have to broadcast messages; a barometer of not just how we see ourselves, but how we aspire to see ourselves.”

The history of the Hill District is well known to longtime Pittsburghers. It was a thriving Black community, nationally known for its outsized contribution to music, art, and literature, bisected by development and left to fade from glory. Hough’s mural—full of colors, images, and texts chosen (and painted) by the community—is meant to inspire people to aim high. It is dominated by a text from the great Hill District playwright August Wilson: “Have a belief in yourself that is bigger than anyone’s disbelief.”

“I walk to the installation site and I’m walking in the footsteps of giants,” says Hough. “Billy Strayhorn, Gus Greenlee, August Wilson, all these people who left their mark. Knowing that I’m traveling in the pathways of those people, as well as the everyday folk that August Wilson wrote about—it’s great company. I’m extremely happy to be here.”

“Public art is about how communities see themselves—it’s an important and powerful tool that we as human beings have to broadcast messages; a barometer of not just how we see ourselves, but how we aspire to see ourselves.” -James “Yaya” Hough, Pittsburgh-born artist 

Hough has an extra connection with the Carnegie Museum of Art: As a teenager, he attended Saturday art classes at the museum, so he sees his participation in the International as coming “full circle.” But he was adamant that his work be outside, where those not visiting the exhibition could experience it, and where it could thrive in a place of freedom.

“There’s a great power in liberating art from museums and institutions,” says Hough. “There’s a power in people having an engagement in art in their everyday life. It breeds conversation, community, and engagement on a personal level. To me, while that can happen in museums and galleries, it doesn’t happen as much.

“The world is much larger outside than inside. That part of it, I’m very familiar with.”

Translating Culture

The cosmology of Édgar Calel’s culture survived a long period of colonization, in part because of its destruction. One aspect of the artist’s International work is a set of drawings made of shards of pottery found by his father. It is the shattered remnants of the Kaqchikel’s material culture—destroyed so that it couldn’t be co-opted, instead surviving through stories, ideas, and a way of being. His work, like so many in the 58th Carnegie International, is a kind of ritual act of translation.

“Beyond translating culture and rituals, I think that I am—and we [artists] are—translating life and culture,” says Calel. “We do it through objects, drawings, words, gestures, thoughts that affirm our presence today.”

“One of the key words for the International was ‘reconstitution,’” says Mohebbi. “How our aesthetic practices—not just of art, but the aesthetics of the everyday; of how to live a beautiful life—how did these practices continue to survive alongside decades of human-caused disruption?”

The family of Edgar Calel performing the Oyonik healing ritual in the fields of San Juan Comalapa; image courtesy of Proyectos Ultravioleta and the artist

Mohebbi is quick to point out that Pittsburgh’s turbulent 20th-century history follows the same era as that covered in this exhibition: from helping build the modern world, to the crisis of the steel crash, to renaissance after renaissance, and, for some local communities, disappointment after disappointment.

It’s a lot to ask of an art show. But perhaps this vast exhibition, with so many artists and cosmologies represented, is itself an act of reconstitution—of giving to Pittsburgh a way of coming out from the madness of the 2020s thus far with a subtly different vision of how we might be.

To find out whether or not it is, in fact, morning for us yet.

Sponsors:

The 58th Carnegie International, presented by Bank of America, is made possible by leadership support from Kathe and Jim Patrinos.

Major support is provided by the Carnegie International Endowment, The Fine Foundation, the Jill and Peter Kraus Endowment for Contemporary Art, and the Carnegie Luminaries.

Significant support is provided by Teiger Foundation, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, The Susan J. and Martin G. McGuinn Exhibition Fund, Henry L. Hillman Foundation, and the Keystone Members of the Carnegie International. The 58th Carnegie International has been made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Generous support is provided by the Heinz Family Foundation, E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation, The Heinz Endowments, Nemacolin, the Louisa S. Rosenthal Family Fund, and the Friends of the Carnegie International. This project is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts.

Additional support is provided by the Mondriaan Fund, the Akers Gerber Foundation, Carnegie Mellon University, Buchanan Ingersoll and Rooney, Highmark Blue Cross Blue Shield and Allegheny Health Network, NOVA Chemicals, Sotheby’s, Orange Barrel Media, Fort Pitt Capital, the Henry Moore Foundation, Advance Auto Parts, Christie’s, Giant Eagle Foundation, UPMC and UPMC Health Plan, the Japan Foundation, PJ Dick-Trumbull-Lindy Group, the Fans of the Carnegie International, and the Carnegie Collective.

The 58th Carnegie International is supported as part of the Dutch Culture USA program by the Consulate General of the Netherlands in New York, and is supported by Etant donnés Contemporary Art, a program from Villa Albertine and FACE Foundation, in partnership with the French Embassy of the United States.

Support for the exhibition catalogue is provided by Gladstone Gallery, Antenna Space Shanghai, De Buck Gallery, Experimenter, Gajah Gallery, Greene Naftali, Hannah Hoffman Gallery, JTT New York NY, Luhring Augustine, Michael Werner Gallery, Modern Art, Proyectos Ultravioleta, Rodeo London / Piraeus, Rossi & Rossi (Hong Kong) Limited, Salon 94, and Stephen Friedman Gallery.

Carnegie Museum of Art is supported by The Heinz Endowments and Allegheny Regional Asset District. Carnegie Museum of Art receives state arts funding support through a grant from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, a state agency funded by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

The post In Celebration of Artists and Their Truth appeared first on Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh.

“The museum smelled like oil,” Mohebbi recalls. “It didn’t feel sterile and rigid. It had texture.” One of the challenges of curating, he says, is maintaining that sense of openness and flux even while committing to artists in an exhibition.

“There is always a certain tension in curating,” says Mohebbi, who was recently named the Kathe and Jim Patrinos Curator of the 58th Carnegie International. “A lot of the practice is about taxonomy, classification, and thematization. Art, for the most part, works against that. Art resists categorization.” Drawing from the ideas of a group of Latina feminist thinkers including Gloria Anzaldúa, Cherríe Moraga, and Mariana Ortega, Mohebbi views that tension as productive. “These are people I refer to as models of how I want to be in the world,” he says. “They write about developing a tolerance for contradictions and learning to hold different, even opposing, truths in our hands.”

Mohebbi is in the early stages of researching, conceptualizing, and choosing the curatorial council for Carnegie Museum of Art’s signature exhibition. He moved to Pittsburgh from Long Island City in July and is figuring out how to get to know the city and curate an international exhibition during a global pandemic. “I trust my collaborators,” he says, but admits he’s struggling with the concept of remote studio visits. “I don’t know how to be spontaneous on Zoom.” At the same time, he finds value in being forced to slow down. “I don’t feel like I have to rush to do everything, so I can be more deliberate.”

There are also aspects to quarantine that feel familiar to him. “For many immigrants, we have already experienced an abrupt stop to our social context,” says Mohebbi. “You are cut off and then you have to start building from there.” There are also echoes, he says, of the 1980s Iran-Iraq war, when the supermarket shelves were often empty. He remembers waiting out missile attacks in the basement while a family friend played guitar. “It’s a fond memory which comes from a very difficult moment,” he recalls.

Mohebbi picked up the guitar himself, playing in various bands in high school and while earning a degree in photography from Tehran University of Art. He toured with 127, a group that mixed punk, dance, jazz, and Iranian music. They made a stop in Pittsburgh in 2008. While touring with 127, he also started contributing to Bidoun, an online magazine covering Middle Eastern art and culture. Realizing he wasn’t all that comfortable performing, he decided to pursue a career as an art curator, attending the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., at the suggestion of Negar Azimi, the editor at Bidoun. He received his master’s degree from Bard in 2010 and has held curatorial posts at the Hammer Museum and REDCAT in Los Angeles and the Queens Museum in New York, among others. In 2018, he became the curator at the SculptureCenter in Long Island City and will remain its curator at large.

“[The International is] a continuation, a process that started many years ago, and it’s an accumulated way of thinking about art and exhibition making.” – Sohrab Mohebbi

“There were lots of artists around when I was growing up,” he says when referencing his career path. His mother, a translator, hosted an informal gallery in their living room, providing a space for artists after the 1979 revolution shut down most of Tehran’s galleries.

The task of curating the International during a pandemic might seem daunting, but Mohebbi doesn’t feel like he’s building the exhibition from scratch. “It doesn’t begin in this moment,” he says. “It’s a continuation, a process that started many years ago, and it’s an accumulated way of thinking about art and exhibition making.”

He’s homed in on two ideas to guide his research: decentralization and reconstitution. Decentralization, he says, means he plans to push past the museum’s walls to disperse art and programming throughout the city in partnership with local organizations. But it further relates to questioning the dominating narratives, beliefs, and histories that reject the multiple ways of living and being in the world. Which leads to the second idea, that of reconstitution. The centralizing way of life, that of endless exploitation of people and the planet, has resulted in the current conditions, he says. “It is as if we woke up and the world as we never knew it was already over; the apocalypse is not impending, it has already happened,” says Mohebbi. “Reconstitution is an archeology of vernacular ways of life, an attempt to bring back together pieces or the residue of what has been, what remains and what is coming, and we can think of it as an aesthetic practice. It means that we need to reject the creation of beauty somewhere and for some people at the expense of ugliness for others.”

Mohebbi is sure the next Carnegie International will speak to the urgent issues of this moment, but not because his curatorial process will force it. “The exhibition is the work of a lot of people, not only artists and curators, but everyone who contributes to its making,” he says. “It is inescapable for it not to be shaped by what’s going on and it will be a document of its time.”

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“I wanted to capture this back door/front door, funny/sad, inside/outside,” Da Corte recalls. “I thought now is the time to make a portrait of the place I live.”

Visitors explore Alex Da Corte’s neon creation. Installation view of Alex Da Corte’s Rubber Pencil Devil, 2018, Courtesy of the artist and Karma Gallery. Photo: Bryan Conley

The Philadelphia-based artist is known for building wonderfully weird worlds of neon, and the one he made for Pittsburgh is epic and absorbing. The frame of a house rises out of aluminum and artificial light, its windows adorned with holiday emblems and electric-pink tulips in flower boxes. The inside glows with friends from childhood: Pink Panther, Popeye, Sylvester the Cat, and Bugs Bunny bellowing a Frank Ocean cover of “Moon River.”

Da Corte is artist, actor, filmmaker, and costume designer for the 57 video shorts running in a continuous three-hour loop inside his colorful creation. He stars as nearly every character, and along with his team made all of the sets and costumes. “Even Mister Rogers’ khaki pants,” he notes.

In a particularly poignant moment, the artist walks slowly through the door of a familiar-looking living room. He’s dressed as Mister Rogers in a brightly colored cardigan, smiling into the camera as he sits down to change his shoes. Soon, he’s out the door and back in again, repeating the ritual in slow motion, in a different colored sweater, again and again.

The structure of the videos is inspired by Bob Dylan’s Subterranean Homesick Blues, a song about another tumultuous time in the country’s history, and its promo clip, during which Dylan cycles through key phrases using notecards. In Da Corte’s performances, there are words of indictment against the American government as well as hidden references to his grandmother’s dementia.

“Painting, culture, pop culture, Alex brings it all together in plain sight, but at the same time hidden from view,” says Schaffner. “There is a sort of casualness or Pop to his work that maybe belies the depth and seriousness of it, but you only need to spend a little bit of time to understand that it’s complex.”

A series of stills drawn from the 57 video shorts that play on a continuous loop inside the neon house.

Da Corte’s visual feast delivers in spades on Schaffner’s goal of inspiring museum joy, an act she defines as the “commotion of being with art and other people actively engaged in the creative work of interpretation.”

Especially now, in the wake of the October 27 tragedy that claimed 11 lives in the heart of Pittsburgh’s Jewish community, Mister Rogers’ real-life neighborhood, joy as a kind of resistance is more urgent than ever.

A language of the land

“Abel Rodríguez is a ‘namer of plants’ who would not necessarily identify as a contemporary artist,” says Ingrid Schaffner. “He learned the language of drawing to transmit knowledge that might otherwise be lost.”

An indigenous elder of the Nonuya people from the Caquetá River region of Colombia, once a community of farmers located not far from the Amazonian rainforest, Rodríguez was reared to know the natural world. You can see it in his lush botanical drawings rendered in shades of green and brown, with rivers of blue occasionally winding through them. At first glance, groups of images look similar, but gradual differences emerge, reflecting seasonal changes: a tree blossoms, fish and turtles fill the river and then disappear; river water rises and recedes.

Photo: Bryan Conley

His knowledge comes from observation and oral traditions. When scientists traveled to the region to do field research, they hired Rodríguez as a guide. Then, in the 1990s, guerrilla violence forced out foreigners and locals alike, and Rodríguez and his wife fled to Bogotá. With few options for earning a living, he reached out to one of the scientists. The director of Tropenbos International Colombia, a Dutch NGO dedicated to the study and protection of tropical rainforests, asked Rodríguez if he would continue teaching them, this time on paper. Rodríguez started making drawings in 1999. And because he has not returned to the forest since, all of the information he imparts is drawn from memory. “I had never drawn before; I barely knew how to write. But I had a whole world in my mind asking me to picture the plants,” Rodríguez said in an interview with the NGO.

Abel Rodríguez, Ciclo anual del bosque de la vega (Seasonal changes in the flooded rainforest), 2009–2010, Courtesy of the artist, Tropenbos International Colombia, and FLORA ars+natura, Bogotá, Colombia

On display in the International are representations of Rodríguez’s larger body of work that Schaffner says she selected to give “a sense of the scope of Abel’s investigation.” In some drawings, he includes written information such as the color and taste of bark and descriptions of crops and which animals feed on them, both in his native Muinane language and in Spanish. All of it flowing from an initial prompt: Draw what you know.

Timeless beauty

Painter Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s installation of 13 striking, dreamlike portraits earned her the Carnegie International’s prestigious Carnegie Prize, which includes a $10,000 award and the Medal of Honor, first issued to Winslow Homer at the 1896 International.

The British-Ghanaian artist made a model of the gallery space for reference, says Ingrid Schaffner, and requested that its walls be painted a color named magnolia. “You can see how much she was thinking staging. Look, for instance, at the painting of the two figures—facing each other, squatting like dancers about to spring on some tacit signal—and at how the corners of the background are painted that same magnolia color, essentially dissolving the canvas and releasing the figures into our space.”

Photo: Bryan Conley

Like all of Yiadom-Boakye’s works, her figures are fictional characters painted from her imagination, composites from a variety of sources, including her own drawings. Composing directly on linen, the artist consults scrapbooks of materials as she works, and takes just a single day to complete a painting.

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Amaranthine, 2018, Courtesy of the artist, Jack Shainman Gallery, New York and Corvi-Mora, London

“Some figures feel almost historic in pose—or painting reference,” says Schaffner. “Others feel absolutely contemporary as if seen in a fashion shoot. At the same time, there really aren’t any fixed temporal cues so that the works slip into and around the present moment.”

The paintings relate to the artist’s writing, which includes vignettes, fables, and short stories. “Some of her portraits feel similar to a scene from a play or a film, others like a full-on episode,” Schaffner continues. “Sometimes something very specific is happening, other times it’s an abstraction. There’s an intentional lack of continuity. She didn’t make one person, one moment, one story. That’s what makes it such a rich installation. Each is offering its own terms.”

Coming for you

Looming large in the Heinz Galleries is Huma Bhabha’s 12-foot-tall sculpture crafted out of cork, a giant tree branch, Styrofoam, and clay on chicken wire. The figure should feel right at home in the museum, says Ingrid Schaffner. “Carnegie Museum of Art’s collection is characterized by a deep humanism and commitment to figurative art,” she says. “Bhabha’s work is in conversation with so much art that is here. Her sculpture could stroll on down the corridor to have a chat with Giacometti’s Walking Man.”

But is it man or monster? Is it from this world or the next? “I prefer to leave it open-ended so that you can imagine whether the skin is stripped off, or whether it’s an addition,” says the Pakistani-American artist who, for six months this year, had a pair of her monumental sculptures installed on the roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Installation view of Huma Bhabha’s sculpture Memories of the Future, 2018, Courtesy of the artist and Salon 94, New York. Photo: Bryan Conley

Her figure for the Carnegie International is made of cultural materials, natural resources, and objects of the Anthropocene. “I think of it as a presence calling a lot to it from the museum,” says Schaffner, noting how ethnographic objects are typically relegated to the part of the building that houses the Museum of Natural History.

Two large-scale drawings that Bhabha makes on photographs hang on each side of her towering creation, functioning as a kind of apocalyptic backdrop. “The drawings are powerful images in their own right,” Schaffner says, “composed with masks, with eyeholes, and animal faces that stare back at you.”

Huma Bhabha, Untitled, 2018, Courtesy of the artist and Salon 94, New York

Miniature still lifes

Every day for more than 30 years, Yuji Agematsu has taken a walk in his adopted city of New York to pick up the tiny leftovers of life—used chewing gum, dental picks, dead bugs, cotton swabs, candy wrappers, chicken bones, hair wrapped around a lollipop, hair stuck to tape. He saves and meticulously records everything he finds.

Back in the studio, he assembles the day’s finds within cellophane sleeves stripped from cigarette packs. He also logs his journey, mostly in Japanese and complete with hand-drawn maps—first in notebooks, and then in his archives, where the objects may sit for years before reaching the status of art. Decay plays a beautiful role in his work.

Installation views of Yuji Agematsu’s zip: 01.01.17…12.31.17 (detail), 2017, Courtesy of the artist and Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York.   Photos: Bryan Conley

His structures are tiny terrariums, no two alike. Some are messy and overflowing, others exact and sparse. Sometimes gross and always enchanting, they’re a fascinating way of marking time and place. The bits of detritus “decide on their own comfortable positions,” Agematsu recently told ARTnews. “My duty is just to help fix them in place.” The artist moved to New York City from Kanagawa, Japan, in 1980, and to get to know his new home he set out on foot; he’s been walking and collecting ever since. On view in the Charity Randall Gallery are 365 packs he made last year, organized in glass cases, each one representing the days and months of the calendar year. And in a case just outside the gallery, the artist displays tiny flakes of artworks that Carnegie Museum of Art conservators have preserved in ziplock bags over the course of years. Exhibited above and below them: rainbows of perfectly preserved used chewing gum that at first glance resemble glistening displays of gems and minerals.

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So when he stands inside Carnegie Museums’ Founder’s Room on a crisp October night, the crowd knows a performance by the artist, whose work tackles science, sociology, history, and technology, will be anything but boring.

“We’re going to have a good time,” Strachan tells them, his arms slicing through the air like a superhero, as he leads the group outside and along Forbes Avenue to the front of Carnegie Music Hall. Flanked by the darkened statues of Shakespeare and Bach, he begins.

“We are here tonight to honor the invisible,” Strachan proclaims. “May this solemnity that we now endeavor together be the alchemy that turns these invisibles visible.”

Then, right on cue, 54 names light up in neon on the fascia ribboning the building’s exterior, the glow causing the crowd to oooh and ahhh as they applaud.

Qiu. Henson. Tharpe. Chaminade.

Curious passersby looking up at the Day-Glo surnames will no doubt wonder—who are these people?

Tavares Strachan’s project extends around the building to Carnegie Library. Installation view, Tavares Strachan, The Encyclopedia of Invisibility, 2018, Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Steel Drone

For Strachan, that’s exactly the point—these artists, scientists, explorers, and other innovators nearly slipped through the cracks of history, but now he’s put their names in lights for the 57th edition of the Carnegie International

When Andrew Carnegie gave the massive sandstone building to the city of Pittsburgh in 1895, the names of Aristotle, Darwin, Leonardo, Mozart, and other accomplished men of literature, science, art, and music were etched into the fascia.

As the story goes and historic records confirm, Carnegie wasn’t happy that his favorite populist poet and fellow Scotsman Robert Burns didn’t make the cut; a building committee, not Carnegie, had the final say. “Some names have no business to be on the list,” Carnegie wrote in a letter in 1894. “Imagine Dickens in and Burns out.” That’s exactly what happened. So, in 1914, Carnegie and friends dedicated a statue to Burns outside of nearby Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens, where it still stands today.

“Neon colors are like candy to me. It’s absurd. It’s playful. We are living in very serious times. In the process, we have lost our ability to play. When you are too serious, that’s kind of boring.”
– Tavares Strachan

Strachan came to town to shake up the list by adding a new set of names in neon script—among them, Matthew Alexander Henson, a black Arctic explorer who was among the first to reach the North Pole; Qiu Jin, a feminist poet and revolutionary who became known as “China’s Joan of Arc”; Sister Rosetta Tharpe, a queer black woman from Arkansas who was the godmother of rock ’n’ roll and the first gospel-singing sensation; and Cécile Chaminade, a prolific and much celebrated French composer and pianist. All told, the names of 54 cultural heroes have taken their rightful places next to the 110 permanent inhabitants of the building’s exterior. (The building’s first expansion, completed in 1907, allowed for 10 additional names.)

Strachan is not alone in transforming the shell of the building. In a major new commission, El Anatsui, a Ghanaian-born artist who lives in Nigeria, draped the 30-by-160-foot façade of Carnegie Museum of Art’s Scaife wing in a majestic and ever-changing sculpture fashioned from discarded liquor bottle tops and aluminum printing plates.

By remaking how we see the building’s exterior, says Ingrid Schaffner, curator of the Carnegie International, “anyone who passes by the museum is in the space of the Carnegie International. More than that, the works of Strachan and Anatsui are already working on our memory. After the exhibition closes, we will look up and see the ghosts of these magnificent works of art.”

Who is forgotten, and why?

Following the illumination of the names, Strachan reveals an unconventional history lesson using humor, theatrics, and a cast of performers. Timothy “Speed” Levitch, an exuberant actor and poet, leads the procession around the historic Oakland complex before introducing the stars of the performance—a group of children sporting white bomber jackets, each custom-made by Strachan and his mother.

The kids step up onto a literal soap box as they deliver their lines, filling in the gaps of history for the adults in the audience. “Tonight is an exciting night for this building. Tonight it gets a chance to express itself,” declares 11-year-old Kairi Bradshaw-Waters.

The young guides and Timothy “Speed” Levitch (far right) on the steps of Carnegie Music Hall.

“I think of Mary Cassatt. Mary was just a girl painter growing up on the North Side. How many times did she stand right here, look up, and ask, ‘Who are all these guys?!’” Naimah Bey, age 10, adds, “For nothing is written in stone. Except, of course, the names on this building.”

“Matthew Henson was the great African American explorer who helped guide the first team of explorers to stand on the North Pole,” continues Isla Bower, age 8. “This goes out to Henson’s soul, still out there exploring tonight. Welcome, my dear, we hope you’re enjoying your newest frontier.”

“The kids really dug in and tuned in. … They will remember this forever. That is why this work is so important.”
– janera solomon, executive director of Kelly Strayhorn Theater

Ten-year-old Thea Siegel shares the story of Nicole-Reine Lepaute, an 18th-century astronomer who correctly “predicted the return of Halley’s Comet, created her own catalog of the stars, and computed the positions of the planets, the sun, and the moon. Undoubtedly, Nicole’s soul is right now busily figuring out the exact trajectory of her neon sign’s shine.”

The young guides learned their lines and workshopped their performance—a close collaboration between the artist and Kelly Strayhorn Theater—in record time.

“The kids really dug in and tuned in,” says janera solomon, executive director of Kelly Strayhorn Theater. “They were so excited to know that an artist was going to make something, and they were going to be a part of it. When they saw the names for the first time during dress rehearsal, they yelled, ‘Look, look, look!’ They will remember this forever. That is why this work is so important.”

Strachan, who splits his time between the Bahamas and New York, is known for using neon to spread his art’s messages across barriers of time, space, race, and gender. “Neon colors are like candy to me. It’s absurd. It’s playful,” he says. “We are living in very serious times. In the process, we have lost our ability to play. When you are too serious, that’s kind of boring.”

For the past five years, Strachan has been compiling an Encyclopedia of the Invisible, a well-researched list of people, places, and things society has forgotten over time, some 2,800 pages worth and counting. A copy, from which the 55 names displayed on the building were drawn, is on view as part of the exhibition.

Strachan’s upbringing in the Bahamas gives him a particular perspective. For people “who grow up in small places, there is a sense of nowhereness. What happens when you are in the arts, dominated by people in New York and Berlin, and what does it mean to be an artist from an island?,” he asks. “You think about how society decides who is visible and part of the conversation. I think hard about getting people to think about things that are not immediately in front of them.”

For example, Strachan places Artemisia Gentileschi, one of the first female artists to have a broad impact on the art of her time, in between Beethoven and Mozart, while rapper Christopher Wallace, known as Biggie Smalls, fits between naturalist Alexander von Humboldt and scientist Roger Bacon.

At the end of the performance, Strachan says, “Imagine getting permission to drill into a 120-year-old building. But if you want to change history, that’s what it might take.”

Getting the necessary city permits to add neon-lit script onto the historic complex was indeed a time-consuming and complicated process that required permission from the city’s Historic Review Commission. Making sure not to impact the historical structure, Strachan and team spaced the new names between the existing ones, with the brackets holding each neon piece attached to mortar, not to stone. In fact, their glow illuminates the existing names and the architecture of the building.

“The neon scripts are here not to erase but to electrify your relationship to the museum,” Schaffner writes in her essay for The Guide to the exhibition.

Monumental collaboration

Soaring above the front entrance to Carnegie Museum of Art, the sculpture is just as El Anatsui imagined it: a new museum façade that “opens up space” for the existing Richard Serra sculpture, Carnegie, and forefronts a major new work of his own.

El Anatsui’s Three Angles blankets the façade of Carnegie Museum of Art, its mirrors pulling the sky into the building. Richard Serra’s steel sculpture, Carnegie, created for the 1985 Carnegie International, is in the foreground at right. Photo: Bryan Conley

Two years ago, when Schaffner invited Anatsui to participate in the Carnegie International, she hoped he would create one of his “monumental mantles”—his latest chapter of work fashioned from scraps of metal and created for historical sites around the world, from a palazzo in Venice to a palace ruin in Marrakech to the Royal Academy of Arts in London.

He agreed, but insisted on total artistic freedom. He would also need a fabricator, someone to actually assemble a massive work of art using materials mostly sourced from Pittsburgh. All of this in a compressed timeframe of nine weeks.

It was definitely a challenge, Schaffner says. Where would she find someone who could pull off such a considerable feat? Enter Dee Briggs, a sculptor based in Wilkinsburg who creates monumental sculpture in an old firehouse she converted into a home and studio.

When Anatsui came to Pittsburgh from Nigeria for a site visit in May, he met Briggs, and the two hit it off immediately. “We spoke the same language,” she says, “sculpture.”

“Anatsui transforms these objects and their historic references into works of tremendous freedom and potential.”
– Ingrid Schaffner, curator of the Carnegie International

Briggs took Anatsui on a tour of the city. From the top of the Duquesne Incline, the pair looked down from Mount Washington at the cityscape. Anatsui’s eye was drawn to the city streets, how they followed the course of the rivers, forming triangles instead of the right-angled grids of most cities. He decided to manipulate the printing plates to form the same sharp angles. “It was a spark,” he says.

While Anatsui worked on the enormous composition from his studio in Africa, Briggs was responsible for fabricating it. They got to work experimenting to create surfaces and textures by folding, crumpling, and stomping upon the aluminum plates donated by Knepper Press, a commercial press in Clinton, Pennsylvania. “It was great fun,” says Briggs.

Dee Briggs (background, far left) and crew raise one of the 20 vertical sections of the sculpture. Photo: Deonna DeVaughn

To make the project more manageable, the pair divided the sculpture into 20 vertical sections—each weighing between 100 and 150 pounds. “Dee was in her studio in Wilkinsburg, El in his in Nsukka, Nigeria,” says Schaffner, “directing and composing as they went along.”

To carry out the plan, Briggs erected a large white tent in her backyard and hired a crew of 21 people, many of them teenagers from her neighborhood as well as nearby Homewood and Braddock. “It was an intense and exhilarating summer job.”

To balance out the towering Serra sculpture, which is made of steel and stands nearly 40 feet high on one side of the museum’s front plaza, Anatsui opted for a vibrant pattern made of bottle caps from Nigeria on the other side. The vertical stripes, notes Anatsui, mirror the motion of the museum’s fountain.

“It is a historical reference,” Anatsui says of the bottle caps, a material he’s worked with since 2007 when he came across a discarded bag full of liquor bottle tops. He connected them to the trade history between Europe, America, and Africa that trafficked in sugar and rum but also in slaves. Mirrors, used by the artist to provide breathing room for the Serra, were also among the objects European traders brought to Africa. “Anatsui transforms these objects and their historic references into works of tremendous freedom and potential,” says Schaffner.

Depending on the weather and the onlooker’s perspective, Anatsui’s sculpture, titled Three Angles, changes. At any moment, the mirrors might reflect the Serra, the University of Pittsburgh’s nearby Cathedral of Learning, or even the clouds in the sky. On clear days, the printing plates turn a darker shade of blue, but they fade to a ghostly hue on a gray Pittsburgh day.

Anatsui says he couldn’t have pulled this project off without Briggs and her painstaking attention to detail. “She is a great, powerful woman.”

In turn, Briggs says she couldn’t have done it without her crew, many of whom are teens who spent the summer helping with every aspect of fabrication, from attaching the large panels to deer fencing using zip ties to putting specialty tape on the back of the printing plates.

Some had never visited Carnegie Museum of Art. Deonna DeVaughn, 15, made her first visit to see the sculpture installed on the front of the building, and was photographed with Anatsui in October. “Never in my life would I have guessed I would help make something like this,” she says, proud of the work that hangs in front of her. “It’s bigger than I thought it would be.”

“We spoke the same language—sculpture.”  – Dee Briggs

Dee Briggs (center), 15-year-old Deonna DeVaughn, and El Anatsui attach sections of bottle caps shipped from Anatsui’s studio in Nsukka. Photo: Natalia Gomez

Her cousin, 16-year-old Nautica Jones, loved her summer job experience, too. “Miss Dee taught me how to use new tools.”

Staring up at the printing plates, the girls recall the many days they spent placing double-sided tape on the backside of the plates inked with the Steelers schedule and other colorful printed matter. They point up at the mirrors, catching the Serra in the reflection.

“Anatsui’s work shows us what a sculpture this building is,” Schaffner says. “Just as Richard Serra did with Carnegie in 1985, El Anatsui has underscored the beauty and monument of the museum with this work.”

The Carnegie International, 57th Edition, 2018, presented by Bank of America, is made possible with major support from the Carnegie International Endowment, The Fine Foundation, and the Keystone Members of the 2018 Carnegie International. Additional support is provided by the Friends of the 2018 Carnegie International, the Jill and Peter Kraus Endowment for Contemporary Art, the National Endowment for the Arts, the EQT Foundation, The Fellows of Carnegie Museum of Art, and the Louisa S. Rosenthal Family Fund.

THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF INVISIBILITY

Oscar Zeta Acosta (1935–1974)
Chicano activist-attorney and novelist best known as the inspiration for Hunter Thompson’s Dr. Gonzo.
Ahmad Baba al Massufi (1556–1627)
Medieval Sanhaja Berber scholar and political provocateur in western Sudan.
Gustavo Ayón (Born 1985)
Mexican professional basketball player who represents the senior Mexican national basketball team.
Sara Josephine Baker (1873–1945)
American physician notable for making contributions to public health, especially within immigrant communities of New York City.
James Baldwin (1924–1987)
American novelist and social critic whose essays explore the intricacies of racial, sexual, and class distinctions in Western societies.
Benjamin Banneker (1731–1806)
African American mathematician and astronomer who built the first striking clock in America.
Charlotta Bass (1874–1969)
An American educator, publisher- editor, and civil rights activist, Bass was the first African American woman to own and operate a
newspaper in the U.S.
Mel Blanc (1908–1989)
American voice actor, radio com-edian, and recording artist known as “The Man of a Thousand Voices.”
Cécile Chaminade (1857–1944)
French female composer and pianist known chiefly for her piano music.
Shirley Chisholm (1924–2005)
The first African American woman in Congress, where she served seven terms. In 1972, she campaigned for the Democratic presidential nomination.
Dorothea Dix (1802–1887)
American activist during the Civil War who sought humane treatment for the mentally ill and created one of America’s first mental institutions.
Shirin Ebadi (Born 1947)
2003 Nobel Peace Prize recipient. Author and legal/human rights scholar who was a judge in her native Iran before the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
Jane Elliott (Born 1933)
Schoolteacher, activist, diversity educator, and feminist known for her “blue eyes-brown eyes” exercise, which allowed students to experience the feeling of discrimination.
Margaret Fell (Margaret Fox) (1614–1702)
Quaker writer and philosopher, known as a feminist pioneer after writing Womens Speaking Justified, which defended a woman’s right to preach.
Maria Elizabeth Smith Fernald (1839–1919)
American entomologist who wrote the major reference book A Catalogue of the Coccidae of the World, which enumerated more than 1,500 species.
Anna Lee Tingle Fisher (Born 1949)
American chemist, emergency physician, and NASA astronaut.
James Ford (1893–1957)
Activist and politician who interpreted communist ideology as it pertained to black communities.
Rosalind Franklin (1920–1958)
English chemist and X-ray crystallographer who made contributions to the understanding of the molecular structures of DNA, RNA, viruses, coal, and graphite.
Artemisia Gentileschi (1593–1652/53)
Italian baroque painter who depicted strong women in biblical and mythological scenes. She became known for her participation in the prosecution of her rapist and was tortured to prove the veracity of her claims.
Alison Hargreaves (1962–1995)
A British mountain climber, Hargreaves scaled Mount Everest alone in 1995 and was the first to solo all the great north faces of the Alps in a single season.
Robert Hayden (1913–1980)
A poet, essayist, and educator, Hayden was the first African American to serve in the role known today known as U.S. Poet Laureate.
Matthew Henson (1866–1955)
African American explorer who accompanied Robert Peary on seven voyages to the Arctic over 23 years. Reached the North Pole in 1909.
Aemilia Hilaria (ca. 300 CE–363 CE)
Gallo-Roman physician who practiced medicine and wrote books on gynecology and obstetrics.
Jack Johnson (1878–1946)
The first African American heavyweight boxing champion. In 2018, Johnson received a posthumous presidential pardon for his 1913 conviction for violating a Jim Crow-era law that made it illegal for him to transport a white woman across state lines.
Kassiani (805–865 A.D.)
One of the first female composers and one of only two Byzantine women to have written in her own name during the Middle Ages.
Hilma af Klint (1862–1944)
Swedish artist considered to be a pioneer of abstract painting.
Hedy Lamarr (1914–2000)
While best known for her film career, the Hollywood actress was also a pioneer in the field of wireless communications and the co-inventor of spread spectrum technology.
Robert Henry Lawrence, Jr. (1935–1967)
U.S. Air Force officer and the first African American astronaut, Lawrence was killed in the crash of an F-104 Starfighter at Edwards Air Force Base.
Nicole-Reine Lepaute (1723–1788)
French astronomer and mathematician known for her prediction of the return of Halley’s Comet.
Malcolm X (1925–1965)
American Muslim minister and human rights activist who is considered to be one of the most influential African Americans in history.
Bruno Manser (1954–2005)
Swiss environmental activist who fought for rainforest preservation and the rights of indigenous peoples.
Thelonious Monk (1917–1982) American jazz pianist with a unique improvisational style. He was the second most recorded jazz composer after Duke Ellington.
Moondog (Louis Thomas Hardin) (1916–1999)
American composer and poet who invented several instruments. He was blind and a familiar figure on New York City streets in the 1950s—60s.
Tenzing Norgay (1914–1986)
A Nepali-Indian Sherpa mountaineer, and one of the first two people known to reach the summit of Mount Everest, along with Edmund Hillary, on May 29, 1953.
Marianne North (1830–1890)
Victorian trailblazer and pioneering botanical artist.
Edith Marion Patch (1876–1954)
An American entomologist, in 1904 she became the head of entomology at the University of Maine.
Lynden Oscar Pindling (1930–2000)
Regarded as the “Father of the Nation” of the Bahamas, having led it to majority rule in 1967 and to independence in 1973. Served as prime minister from 1967–1992.
Agnes Luise Wilhelmine Pockels (1862–1935)
German pioneer in chemistry best known for establishing surface science.
Harriet Powers (1837–1910)
Former slave, folk artist, and quilt maker from rural Georgia who recorded local legends, Bible stories, and astronomical events on her quilts.
Qiu Jin (1875–1907)
Chinese revolutionary, feminist, and writer. Qiu, who was executed, is considered a national heroine in China.
Haile Selassie (1892–1975)
Ethiopia’s regent and emperor who also served as chairperson of the Organization of African Unity.
Tupac Shakur (1971–1996)
American rapper and actor who sold more than 75 million records worldwide.
Sister Nancy (Ophlin Russell) (Born 1962)
Jamaican dancehall DJ and singer best known for the reggae anthem “Bam Bam.”
Robert Smalls (1839–1915)
African American slave who became a naval hero and politician.
Margaret Chase Smith (1897–1995)
As a Republican representing Maine, Smith was the first woman to serve in both houses of the United States Congress. She is best known for her 1950 speech the “Declaration of Conscience” championing free speech.
Sombath Somphone (Born 1952)
Internationally acclaimed community development worker and prominent member of Lao civil society. He was abducted by police in 2012 and has not been seen since.
George Edwin Taylor (1857–1925)
A newspaper writer-editor who in 1904 became the first African American selected by a political party to be its candidate for the presidency of the United States.
Sister Rosetta Tharpe (1915–1973)
Black singer, songwriter, guitarist, and the “Godmother of Rock ’n’ Roll,” first known for her gospel recordings.
Christopher Wallace (Biggie Smalls) (1972–1997)
Considered one of the best rappers of all time and a central figure in the East Coast hip-hop scene.
Martha Beatrice Webb (1858–1943)
English sociologist, economist, socialist, labor historian, and social reformer. Coined the term “collective bargaining.”
Nathaniel Thomas Wilson (Kool G Rap) (Born 1968)
Considered one of the most influential American rappers and an inspiration for some of hip-hop’s most acclaimed figures.
Christa Winsloe (1888–1944)
20th-century German-Hungarian novelist, playwright, and sculptor.
Francesca Woodman (1958–1981)
American photographer best known for her black-and-white pictures featuring herself or female models.
Rosalyn Yalow (1921–2011)
Inventor of radioimmunoassay (RIA), a tool for determining minute substances in the urine and blood, and a joint recipient of the 1977 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

Full entries appear in Tavares Strachan’s Encyclopedia of the Invisible, a collection that is currently 2,800 pages long and growing.

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How did the recently surfaced travel diaries from former museum director Gordon Washburn, kept during his 1950s research trips for the International, play a role in the project?
LC: One thing that struck us is how he would describe a work of art very quickly and then write “yes” or “no.” This simple decision determined if the work would end up being in the museum or perhaps get seen at all. Also, he was describing what he was seeing in these beautiful little accidental haikus, like: “Child Fallen in Well. No.” We were taken by those moments of linguistic connection between, say, a title and a “yes” or “no,” as if it is acceptable or not. I think that kind of play was our way in.

You learned that a list of all submissions existed?
LC: It’s so rare, because usually museums or galleries, when they reject something, that’s it. It’s gone. The fact that the museum kept these meticulous records is really remarkable. As artists, Jon and I both love systems and lists. This was the most beautiful, complete list of absences, which are normally completely unspoken and invisible.

Why revive the rejections?
JR: It’s akin to how history is told through the victor’s eyes. There’s one version of what the International is that’s one of tens of thousands of versions of what it could be. We’re using our inclusion in the show as a loophole to bring in 10,632 works we found lying just outside the history of the International. In essence, their rejected works become our accepted work.

You will paint the titles in alphabetical order. Why?
LC: Once we shifted it alphabetically, it became this extraordinary narrative—a collection of everything that people during this time period felt worth paying attention to and depicting. It’s extremely touching, this encyclopedic list of human endeavor. Then, when layered on top of that, you think of this all being rejected.
JR: In working alphabetically, a beautiful non-linear progression occurs, as one title flows to the next, like The Only Time, The Opal Pool, The Open Door, The Open Sea, The Opera Cloak, and The Organ Grinder. Also, there’s wonderful repeats throughout like Gray Day from 1908 and Gray Day from 1924 by two entirely different artists perhaps living in two entirely different cities, but sharing the same subject matter—and rejection.
LC: The absence comes up in this, too, because in the original records, what’s noted is the artist’s name, the year, the title of the painting, and whether it was “A” (accepted) or “R” (rejected). That’s it. There’s no image attached to the record, or further description. If I say to you Gray Day and to another person Gray Day, it’s probably a completely different image for each of you. It’s lovely to think that both paintings actually existed in the museum for a period, but they were never seen by the public.

You want visitors to take a work home?
JR: We both love the idea that you can enter Carnegie Museum of Art and escape with a painting. We are using the Forum Gallery as a temporary site to conjure these historically rejected works into this contemporary moment and then back out again into the world. So, we are interested in offering visitors a chance to take home and give a new life, context, and future to these works, perhaps imagining themselves as part of a new community of 10,632 collectors.

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When class let out, he learned just as much roaming the cavernous halls of Carnegie Museums of Art and Natural History. His favorite exhibit was the dinosaurs. He remembers sitting on the floor, staring up at museum painter Ottmar von Fuehrer perched atop scaffolding as he brought the Tyrannosaurus rex to life in a mural that once loomed large over Carnegie’s dinosaurs.

This October, Bochner will return to his childhood museum as a participant in its premier exhibition, the Carnegie International. The homecoming is long overdue for an innovator who rejected abstract expressionism and was among the first to introduce language into the visual field.

“You cannot study contemporary art and the conceptual art movement and not learn about Mel Bochner. In 1966, he exhibited four three-ring binders loaded with pieces of paper from other artists that he had collected and Xeroxed and called it a drawing show,” says Ingrid Schaffner, curator of the 2018 Carnegie International. “He is a generative figure who has been collected by our museum, who has a major public artwork on the Carnegie Mellon University campus, and yet Mel has never been in a Carnegie International. So, we had to set that situation right. It’s very significant for Mel and very significant for us.”

Bochner’s 1966 show Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant to Be Viewed as Art is credited as the earliest exhibition of conceptual art, a movement that forefronts the idea or concept behind a work of art over the finished art object. Bochner, who is also a writer, has long used words and numbers as his material, exploring the limits of language as well as the relationship between language and images by experimenting with how they influence perception. Repetition plays a major role in his work, and he often revisits the same words and phrases. His word paintings are at once playful and provocative, intellectual and ironic.

Mel Bochner in his 1966 show Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant to Be Viewed as Art, credited as one of the earliest exhibitions of conceptual art.

Consider his 2008 work titled Blah, Blah, Blah, now on view in Crossroads: Carnegie Museum of Art’s Collection, 1945 to Now and one of several works by Bochner in the museum’s permanent collection. Painted in light blue capital letters against a dark blue background, the word is repeated over and over, oil paint dripping from the edges of some letters.

“It’s a response to the world as it is, the current level of the discourse, the conversation,” says Bochner. “On one level it’s funny, and on another level it’s critical. On a third level it’s political.”

His well-known thesaurus paintings include lines of synonyms that often grow increasingly confrontational as he makes his way down the canvas. A painting titled Go Away begins gently with “go away” and “get lost” and then escalates to “leave me alone” and “scram” before culminating in a profanity.

For the International, Bochner is creating a series of new word paintings, the sum of which the curatorial team imagines will be a “very aggressive greeting” inside the Heinz Galleries. Several paintings will pop up in more unexpected locations throughout the museum. One asks, Do I have to draw you a picture? spelled out in white block letters on black velvet, some of the letters smudged or protruding to create nuance. To build in an element of surprise, Bochner will only say that the other new works are on velvet. “It’s a beautiful surface. It absorbs all the light. It does not reflect. It has all these oddly kitschy qualities, an “Elvis-is-alive” quality. That was inadvertent but not unappreciated.”

Inside his New York studio, Bochner’s process is one of exploration. “It’s like a rope with many strands and you can take apart the strands and reweave them and find different ways of saying things,” he says. “It’s not one thing after the other. It’s many things at once. That’s the fun of it.”

Bochner would distinguish himself as an artist and lover of language after putting in some hard time as the assistant to a sign painter. His father, Meyer Bochner, was responsible for the lettering on shop windows and storefronts throughout Pittsburgh’s Oakland neighborhood, including the well-known Original Hot Dog Shop. Working long hours for meager pay, he set up shop in the basement of the family’s modest house near the corner of Beechwood Boulevard and Wilkins Avenue (“it wasn’t called Point Breeze back then”) and enlisted his son to fill in the letters he had outlined.

“Basically, I apprenticed against my will,” Bochner says. “But I learned a lot, most of all how to work hard.”

From an early age, the artist’s talent showed through his drawings. As a student at Linden Elementary School, his teachers selected him to be one of two students to attend the Tam O’Shanter art classes, a museum program that will turn 90 this fall and is known today as The Art Connection. Bochner continued taking the classes throughout high school, and, when time allowed, he sometimes set off to explore the surrounding Oakland neighborhood or go to a Pirates game at nearby Forbes Field for 99 cents—or, even better, sneak in for free.

Selected to attend the museum’s Tam O’Shanter art classes in 1949, Mel Bochner won a Scholastic Arts Award for his efforts.

Bochner also remembers viewing the Carnegie International, which occurs about every four years, on class field trips, but it made little impression. He was more enthralled with the tour of the Heinz ketchup factory, coming home with a pickle-pin souvenir.

Even so, the art instruction at the museum awakened something in him. But he wasn’t sure of the path forward. “I didn’t know what being an artist meant,” recalls Bochner. “The closest thing was the covers of the Saturday Evening Post. My father revered Norman Rockwell.”

Of Bochner’s artwork, his father’s favorites were the drawings of Moses and the Ten Commandments he created as a kid in Hebrew school. He was less enamored with the works that would one day hang on museum walls and garner international acclaim. “Success for him would have meant that I became
a doctor,” says Bochner. “There was nothing that would be equivalent. My mother was more appreciative.”

Instead of going to medical school, Bochner studied art at Carnegie Technical Institute, now Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). He says he received an excellent education, but the one thing he didn’t learn was how to make a living with a fine arts degree.

After graduation, Bochner headed west to post-beatnik San Francisco, where he apprenticed at an antiques restoration business, “basically making fake antiques.” After a stop in Mexico, he returned to Pittsburgh and worked as a substitute teacher at an elementary school in Homewood. While he loved the work, teaching didn’t leave enough time for painting.

Mel Bochner, Syncline, 1979/1981, William G. Bechman Charitable Trust in Memory of William G. and Beatrice M. Bechman © Mel Bochner

Bochner’s 1979/1981 wall drawing Syncline was among the first conceptual artworks to enter the museum’s collection.

He arrived in New York City in 1964, just as the art scene was exploding with the avant-garde work of Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol. “I didn’t know anybody or anything,” he says. “It was all happening above my radar.”

Even after he became acclimated to the New York scene, he was still reaching for something original. His breakout moment came in 1966, when he was asked to curate an art show. But instead of mounting works on the walls, he photocopied the notes, sketches, and diagrams of various artists, putting them in binders displayed on pedestals in the gallery. The show created a sensation, and from there he moved on to words and numbers—and international acclaim as a conceptual artist. But it’s a term he doesn’t like. “All art is conceptual,” Bochner says. “It’s redundant.”

He returned to CMU in 2004 as part of a collaboration with landscape architect Michael Van Valkenburgh. Together, they created the Kraus Campo, a rooftop installation at the Posner Center that combines art—including Bochner’s trademark numerical sequencing patterns and text—and landscape design. It’s often described as both garden-as-sculpture and sculpture-as-garden.

Today, Bochner is once again making new art for the city that helped shape him as an artist. At 77, he says he has no desire to slow down. “Artists don’t retire.”

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She considers painting a “subplot” of the 57th edition of the exhibition, with the worlds of architecture, design, nature, decorative arts, and literature all providing content and context for today’s contemporary painters—even inspiring their choices in materials, colors, and format.

Among the painters creating new works for the show, which opens October 13, are Sarah Crowner, Ulrike Müller, and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, each of whom explore the medium in bold and surprising ways, and from novel starting points.

As Crowner contemplated her work for the International, it was the world she discovered within Carnegie Museum of Art that started her thinking. After touring the Heinz Galleries this past May, she was inspired by the space itself. “It’s impressive,” Crowner says. “The ceilings are high and there’s a beautiful terrazzo floor. It has a grand, symmetrical feeling, and I knew I wanted to do something that paid attention to or honored the architecture.”

Sarah Crowner at work on a sewn canvas in her studio. Photo: Rosy Keyser

She looked to the skylights, which Müller suggested opening, to bring another, ever-changing dimension to her work. “I think it’s interesting the ways in which painting can respond to light and nature,” she says. “It then becomes something that’s living and malleable, not something that’s fixed.”

The Brooklyn-based artist is creating two new works—one made of terra-cotta blue-glazed tiles, the other a sewn canvas. Both are large, hang on the wall, and from Crowner’s perspective fall somewhere between painting and architecture.

“I always had this idea about walking on a painting or immersing yourself in a painting,” she says. “I started working with colorful tiles making floor installations. It occurred to me that tile is a form of hard-edged geometric painting. There’s a lot of gesture, imperfection, and inconsistency within the surface of each tile,” Crowner adds. “It relates so much to painting.”

Her stitched works reflect that same mindset. Their shapes and curves are cut out of different canvases, and their lines are the seams that bind the patterns together. Though installation-based, they’re informed by a painterly way of looking at and processing the visual world.

“Sarah’s work casts us as compositional elements or players within a more expanded field that she’s calling painting,” says Eric Crosby, Carnegie Museum of Art’s Richard Armstrong Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art. “It’s a liberating way of thinking about a medium that is so often defined by its limitations.”

An installation view of Crowner’s 2016 exhibition Plastic Memory at Simon Lee Gallery in London. Photo: Todd-White Art Photography, courtesy of the artist

Composed of adjoining panels, Crowner’s vibrant, 64-by-8-foot tile painting is described by International associate curator Liz Park as a “wash of blue” that will greet visitors at the top of the Scaife stairs, a main entrance for the exhibition. From there, the work will punch its way into Heinz Gallery A, prompting visitors to follow, as it flows from a pale blue to a darker blue along the way. Once inside Heinz Gallery A, museumgoers will also find Crowner’s wall-sized sewn canvas and Ulrike Müller’s baked enamel on steel and woven-rug paintings.

“Sarah’s work will very much catch the viewers as they come up the stairs and point them into the exhibition,” Müller says. “I was interested in creating moments of resistance in relation to that flow so that there is a tension—a closeness and a farness, a fastness and a slowness—a certain engagement from the very beginning of you entering the space.”

Müller’s choice of enamel and wool is no accident. “Painting is a medium associated with art-historical canons and certain notions of power,” she says. “I’m interested in decentering those ideas, and one way to do that is through material.”

Unexpected tension

Müller’s use of enamel evolved from her desire to develop the visual vocabulary of her drawings in a new medium. Working exclusively on paper simply didn’t cut it. “It was too quiet, too vulnerable,” says Müller, who was born in Austria and now lives and works in New York City. Ultimately, it was enamel’s sign-like quality that spoke to her.

She also likes its contradictions. “The enamel paintings look so geometrical and sharp-edged from a distance,” Müller says, “but then when you go closer there’s actually quite a bit of fuzziness in the lines because I use powdered glass.”

Her woven-wool-rug pieces offer a similar sensibility. And although she does have a background in textiles, Müller collaborates with rug makers in Mexico to transform her drawings into woven paintings, which she sometimes displays on gallery floors.

Ulrike Müller at the 2015 opening of Ulrike Müller: The old expressions are with us always and there are always others in Vienna, Austria. Photo: eSeL.at – Lorenz Seidler

For the International, she will introduce new wall hangings—six smaller enamel works and two new large-scale rugs. Both of the rugs will prominently feature a shoe.

“It’s a very specific image of a high-heeled woman’s shoe [and part of a lower leg] that is 8 foot tall and that can be read in a number of ways,” says Müller.

“The most obvious is along the lines of entering the space or stepping into the exhibition. But then it’s also a ridiculously large shoe, and it’s gendered and it’s sexy and it sits in an unexpected tension.

“I’ve had fun thinking about different ways in which this shoe could resonate in the contemporary moment,” she continues, “and in the context of the Carnegie—the museum and the International. It’s introducing a signifier that holds enough different kinds of potential meaning.”

But, says Müller—who is known for her use of a wide range of artistic mediums, including performance and publishing, to explore the relationship between abstraction and the human body—meaning is not inherent to the artwork. “It’s what happens when somebody is looking at, talking about, and interacting with the work.”

Ulrike Müller, Wraps, 2018, vitreous enamel on steel, Courtesy of the artist

Crosby is attracted to the importance of drawing in Müller’s pieces. “Regardless of her chosen medium, there is always something intimate and hand-drawn in the work,” he says. “She’s also an incredible colorist who’s exploring the different ways in which color can prompt an emotional reaction or evoke an historical reference.”

Over the past year, in preparation for the reinstallation of Carnegie Museum of Art’s contemporary galleries, which opened in July, Crosby has given much thought to the museum’s robust holdings in contemporary painting, a clear strength of the museum’s permanent collection thanks in large part to acquisitions from past Internationals. Some of the heavyweights whose works were collected out of the show just in the past two decades include Laura Owens, Christopher Ofili, Peter Doig, and most recently Nicole Eisenman, the winner of the 2013 Carnegie Prize. An entire gallery of the museum’s contemporary reinstallation, which Crosby titled Crossroads: Carnegie Museum of Art’s Collection, 1945 to Now is devoted to the “challenges and pitfalls” of contemporary painting.

“What Ingrid has done with her choice of painters for this International,” says Crosby, “is invite all of us to imagine what else a painting can be.”

Every picture tells a story

“Ahistoric” is the term Lynette Yiadom-Boakye uses to capture the enigmatic essence of her paintings. Unveiling a new series of portraits for the International, her signature style is unambivalent: large oil-on-linen canvases, hung low on the wall, and featuring black figures.

At first glance, Yiadom-Boakye’s work seems to recall the classic style of portraitists who have come before her. And so, one might assume that her subjects sit for days as she studies their faces, gestures—their very souls.

But the people who populate Yiadom-Boakye’s world don’t exist in ours. They are manifestations of the artist’s imagination. “Everything’s a composite,” this daughter of Ghanaian parents who moved to London 50-some years ago told Interview Magazine in 2017. “I work from sources. I make scrapbooks, I make drawings, and collect things that I might use later, so they are all very literal compositions in the way that I pull things together. A lot of that decision-making happens on the painting itself. In each case, it’s a negotiation of how I want each figure to fill the space.”

An installation view of the 2017 exhibition Lynette Yiadom-Boakye: Under-Song For A Cipher at the New Museum in New York.  Photo: Maris Hutchinson/EPW Studio

There are also negotiations going on between the written word and the brush stroke. “I’m endlessly fascinated by Lynette’s work and her cast of characters,” Crosby says. “The work is rooted in writing, and the entities she conceives then take physical shape in paint.”

For Yiadom-Boakye, who lives in London, the two pursuits are inextricably linked. “The same thread of logic runs through my writing and painting. It’s something to do with having a particular way of thinking creatively. The things I can’t paint, I write, and the things I can’t write, I paint.”

Artist Lynette Yiadom-Boakye with work from her Versus After Dark exhibition, Serpentine Galleries. Photo: The PinchukArtCentre © 2013. Photographed by Sergey Illin

Although she admits that her writing projects are still very much works in progress, each of her paintings usually begins and ends in one exhaustive eight-hour session. Despite that sense of immediacy, they purposefully betray no sense of time or place.

“The timelessness is completely important,” she said in Interview. “It’s partly about removing things that would become in some way nostalgic. There aren’t really any markers of time, like furniture or a particular style of shoe that denote a particular period or place. I think that’s why I like the outdoors, because it removes a sense of time and I want the painting to feel timeless, because it increases that sense of omnipotence.”

Kerry James Marshall, Rythm Mastr, 1999–present, © Kerry James Marshall. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

Kerry James Marshall is returning to his epic narrative featuring black superheroes two decades after the comic series debuted at the 1999 Carnegie International.

That sense of power and influence can be exhilarating, and in at least some small way that’s what the International is all about. Dating back to its debut in 1896, after which the museum acquired paintings by Winslow Homer and James A. McNeill Whistler, the show has always informed the museum’s permanent collection.

This year’s International will be infused with new ways of considering painting today as prompted by the work of Crowner, Müller, and Yiadom-Boakye. Also noteworthy are the print-like paintings of words by Mel Bochner (at right), an installation of strangely romantic paintings and photographs by Karen Kilimnik, and a return to an epic narrative by Kerry James Marshall, who is revisiting his Rythm Mastr comic series featuring black superheroes two decades after it debuted at the 1999 Carnegie International.

“Painters are always reaching back—reaching back and pulling things forward,” says Crosby. “Our collection so eloquently speaks to how artists have done this over the years.”

Come October, perhaps the past will be present once again as old ideas are revisited among the new.

“Ingrid [Schaffner] is making a very serious effort to evaluate an old convention, the tradition of the exhibition format, to see how much weight it can carry in this moment,” Müller says. “For me, it’s an opportunity to think about how my work fits in this situation. It was also a challenge in terms of scale. The rugs are the biggest pieces I’ve ever made. It wasn’t necessarily my primary ambition to go large, but I liked the challenge.”

The Carnegie International, 57th Edition, 2018, presented by Bank of America, is made possible with major support from the Carnegie International Endowment, The Fine Foundation, and the Keystone Members of the 2018 Carnegie International. Additional support is provided by the Friends of the 2018 Carnegie International, the Jill and Peter Kraus Endowment for Contemporary Art, the National Endowment for the Arts, the EQT Foundation, The Fellows of Carnegie Museum of Art, and the Louisa S. Rosenthal Family Fund.

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­Accumulating in their “take pile” are pipes of all sizes, I-beams, tangled cables, hefty stacks of rectangular plates, what appears to be a locker, and a 9-foot ladder—all rusted steel vestiges of the now idle, hulking blast furnaces. Much of their harvest, some 11 tons in all, are remnants of the top of a towering hot-stove stack that, for safety reasons, was painstakingly disassembled last summer.

Chacon and Martínez, with fellow artist and instigator Kade Twist, form the interdisciplinary artist collective Postcommodity. They live and work in New Mexico and California andcome from indigenous backgrounds (Navajo, Mestizo, and Cherokee, respectively) that inform their practice. The day’s foraging for mostly 100-year-old steel is part of the trio’s fourth trip to Pittsburgh and second visit to the former U.S. Steel complex to prepare for the Carnegie International.

Over the past year, as they’ve developed the work of art that now blankets 2,000 square feet of the Hall of Sculpture’s brilliant white marble floor, they’ve merged—and complicated—the histories of industry and jazz in Pittsburgh.

Kade Twist of Postcommodity in the early stages of building the collective’s installation on the ground floor of Carnegie Museum of Art’s Hall of Sculpture. Photo: Bryan Conley

“An assumption of ours is that when people think about the steel industry, they probably think about blood, sweat, and tears—and football,” Martínez says. “But maybe not so much about the role of African Americans in the context of that history, or how the role of industry has been a factor in the emergence and the rise of jazz in America.”

On a guided walking tour of Pittsburgh’s Hill District by ethnomusicologist Colter Harper and in the images of the late Pittsburgh Courier photojournalist Teenie Harris, the three men discovered the ghost of the African American city-within-a-city that from the 1930s to the 1950s was a mecca of black culture and business known as “the crossroads of the world.”

Through the lens of Harris’ camera, Postcommodity learned of the neighborhood’s essential place in jazz history—launching the careers of the likes of First Lady of Jazz Mary Lou Williams, Billy Eckstine, and Erroll Garner, and, in its heyday, serving as home to more than 30 jazz clubs, regular stops for national artists. But the trio’s conversations with community members would quickly move on to talk of racial discrimination in the mills, the hard-fought unionization of the city’s black labor, and the city’s urban renewal of the 1950s that displaced more than 8,000 residents and 400 businesses, forever changing the neighborhood.

“Through that experience we began to imagine the connections between what black steelworkers were experiencing at the workplace in relationship to maybe what it might have felt like after a hard day’s work,” says Martínez. “You know, going out to the club on weekends and listening to jazz, and how those stories, those feelings, those experiences influenced the music. Part of it was listening to those stories, letting them sink into our bones, and providing feedback through the artistic process.”

Embedded in Postcommodity’s installation titled From Smoke and Tangled Waters We Carried Fire Home are symbols that include an abstracted North Star and the confluence of Pittsburgh’s rivers—a path toward freedom and “perceived social and cultural mobility,” says Twist. It’s the story of the Underground Railroad and a people swept north during the Great Migration for the opportunity to make iron, steel, and aluminum. From the years of World War I through the late 1960s, 6 million African Americans moved from the South to the North and West, with more than 100,000 African Americans ending up in Pittsburgh. The movement was momentous not only for its scale, but because it was organic; it was not organized.

“An assumption of ours is that when people think about the steel industry, they probably think about blood, sweat, and tears—and football. But maybe not so much about the role of African Americans in the context of that history, or how the role of industry has been a factor in the emergence and the rise of jazz in America.” — Cristóbal Martínez

“They came for a better life, and now we are experiencing another wave of northward migration. And so, do we position those historical narratives as contemporary metaphors for new immigrant experiences?” Martínez lets the question hang in the air. “This is a way of remembering. By remembering we can see history repeating itself. In negative ways, in positive ways, and everything in between.”

Within the 57th edition of the Carnegie International, opening on October 13, a number of artists, like Postcommodity, will ask visitors to wrestle with history, and with what curator Ingrid Schaffner calls “shifting terrain”—issues of borders and boundaries, nationhood, and a world and its people in transition.

The architecture of displacement

For Saba Innab, a Palestinian architect and urban researcher, questioning the meaning of architectural and urban planning in a state of occupation and constant conflict is a recurring theme. Through painting, mapping, sculpture, and design, Innab, who was born in Kuwait and lives between Amman and Beirut, says she’s constantly working through notions of building and dwelling in “the temporary that is mutating into a permanent state,” referencing the Palestinian refuge and exile as a point of departure.

For the International, the artist is creating a site-specific work for the Museum of Art’s beloved Hall of Architecture. Titled What is Unseen Cannot Be Broken, the work is an abstraction triggered by an image of a partially exposed tunnel in the Gaza Strip, a tiny coastal wedge that is home to nearly 2 million Palestinians. The tunnel had been excavated by the Israeli army. “Seeing becomes destroying,” Innab says. “To think about this image, invisibility is what keeps the tunnel.”

Saba Innab, Study, 2018, Courtesy of Saba Innab 

An early sketch by Saba Innab of her installation for the Carnegie International.

Gaza citizens have been digging and using tunnels for years. Because of the Israeli blockade of Gaza, introduced when Hamas won elections in 2006, the underground passageways have been an economic lifeline for Gaza citizens in need of basic consumer goods like food, clothing, and gasoline.

In recent years, Hamas has boasted of a border tunnel-building frenzy. Referring to them as “terror tunnels,” the Israeli military says the new vast tunnel network is complex and advanced and designed to carry out attacks on Israeli civilians and soldiers alike. Israel reports destroying a number of them.

“Simply, Gaza is under siege, and the tunnel is a way of survival,” Innab says. “To expose the tunnel—whether by exposing it physically or freezing it in a museum of dominantly Western history—the movement becomes the impossibility of movement.

“Things are better recognized by their contraries; we recognize movement when we are still, and a gate is a gate because it closes. Everything can be the thing and its opposite, depending on where we stand. The tunnel is a structure, or a method of survival. When excavated, it becomes the sign of the colonizer—so the oxymoron is not only represented in the possibility/ impossibility of movement.”

Saba Innab, Time is Measured by Distance, Commissioned by Marrakech Biennale 6, 2016, Courtesy of Saba Innab

Innab’s contribution to the 2016 Marrakech Biennial, Time is Measured by Distance, emulates the negative space of the Strait of Gibraltar, the narrow passage that connects the Atlantic Ocean to the Mediterranean Sea and separates Europe from Africa. Photo: Photo: Diego Jiménez

The International marks only the second time the artist will exhibit in the United States. Innab says that while specific audiences don’t impact the way she thinks about a project, sites are always implicated in her work.

Asked if she considers her project to be in dialogue with the rare collection of 140 architectural casts of the Greco-Roman world housed in the Hall of Architecture, she says, “I think it’s a contrast more than a dialogue; the collection assumes a specific mode of authority of a major history line, with clear writers of history. What I’m interested in is not only to challenge this authority, but it is also an invitation to imagine the source of the excavated body; to imagine what is normally marginalized, terrorized—which is also a form of resistance and survival.”

Life along an invisible line

While Postcommodity was reconstructing Pittsburgh’s past, New York-based artist Zoe Leonard was out exploring with her camera the once-mighty Rio Grande as it flows downstream from Juárez, Mexico, on one side, and El Paso, Texas, on the other. She’s focusing on both sides of an 1,100-mile stretch, says Leonard, “where a natural feature is used to perform a political task.”

Leonard’s three-decade-long career producing photography and sculpture that tussles with themes like migration, the urban landscape, and gender and sexuality is being celebrated in a major retrospective slated to open in November at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, after debuting at the Whitney Museum of American Art this past spring.

Zoe Leonard, Image from Rio (working title), 2016-2018. Gelatin silver prints. © Zoe Leonard, Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth and Galerie

For this latest project, she photographed the desert and the mountains, the cities and the villages, the farms, factories, fences, armed barricades, and the pastoral open country that coexist with and often are made possible by the Rio Grande. In some areas, it’s now just a trickle due to historic drought and irrigation demands on both sides of the border.

“ I am looking closely at the river in order to observe the multiple and complex pressures that bear down on this thin line of moving water; this work is a way of thinking about a larger social and political landscape.”
– Zoe Leonard

For the International, Leonard will show Prologue, the first part of ongoing work titled El Rio/The River. She has written: “Historically, the Rio Grande has figured large in the public imagination, as a symbol and icon of the American West. Currently it is at the center of contemporary political debates regarding borders, immigration, national security, labor, economy, culture, climate change, energy, resources, drug trade, wildlife, and water rights.

“I am looking closely at the river in order to observe the multiple and complex pressures that bear down on this thin line of moving water; this work is a way of thinking about a larger social and political landscape.”

Zoe Leonard, Analogue (detail), 1998–2009, 412 C-prints and gelatin silver prints, 28 x 28 cm/11 x 11 inches (each) © Zoe Leonard, Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth and Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY

Made over decades, Analogue (above) is a landmark project by Zoe Leonard that in 412 photographs connects the vanishing mom-and-pop shops from her Lower East Side neighborhood to the emergence of a global rug trade. 

The U.S.-Mexico border is also the site of a past work by Postcommodity. Repellent Fence crossed the border with a line of “scare-eye” balloons highlighting both the absurdity and humanity of border politics. It seems fitting, then, that Leonard’s photographs of the Rio Grande on the second-floor balcony of the Hall of Sculpture will hang above the collective’s work on the hall’s ground floor.

An installation detail from Postcommodity’s 2015 Repellent Fence. Photo by Michael Lundgren, courtesy of Postcommodity

The act of remembering

Over four full days in late July, Cristóbal Martínez and Kade Twist—armed with brooms, a rake, and orange contractor buckets full of crushed glass and coal—painstakingly installed From Smoke and Tangled Waters We Carried Fire Home. It was a monumental effort made possible with the added muscle of three museum preparators and two installation assistants.

“We’re riffing on the sand painting, reimagining its ceremony,” says Twist. “The Navajo were not concerned about the Rust Belt. But the tribes suffered lots of casualties in construction.” In traditional Navajo sand paintings, finely ground charcoal, cornmeal, and turquoise are among the materials used to form a storyline of harvests and healing. In addition to chunks of rusted steel, Postcommodity added to its palette 7 tons of recycled white crushed glass from Dlubak Glass in Natrona Heights and 3 tons of nut and stove coal from Kiefer Coal & Supply in Bethel Park, references to important themes in their art and music practices: cultural self-determination in the face of the destruction of native lands through the extraction of fossil fuels.

While the focus is on Pittsburgh’s history, the sacrifices made by marginalized laborers is personal for Twist and Martínez, whose fathers were a steamfitter and a metalworker, respectively.

“The entire city of Pittsburgh made sacrifices for this country. The labor is a shared sacrifice,” says Twist. “The entry point [for the painting] is black history, but it’s relevant to all Rust Belt towns. Eighty years of suffering—that’s a lot of cancer, death, a lot of families dealing with emotional and physical pain.”

Martínez looks out over the finished artwork: “There are lots of secrets in there. There are lots of ideas. We’ve been making art together for a long-time, and things emerge and recede. We thought about coded messages, symbols, the confluence of ideas, connected knowledge, drawing a through-line across complexity.

“This is a pictogram,” he says. “It ties to images and ideas we grew up with. There’s a river, a snake, of course lots of Western influences, lots of influences from Africa, from our own peoples.”

But the painting’s story, says Raven Chacon, is for the people of Pittsburgh to tell.

The group is partnering with James and Pamela Johnson, the founders of the Afro American Music Institute in Homewood, to identify a rotating group of intergenerational jazz musicians to interpret the painting by performing it. In September, Chacon, who is a composer, will work with the musicians to develop their own readings of the work that doubles as a graphic score.

“As a musician, you analyze the various regions of the work and you take from it; this part is telling me to play so many nodes, or I have to have so much texture to my playing,” he explains. “There is no wrong way to play it, but there are guidelines to help you navigate it.”

From the Hall of Sculpture balcony, at 1 p.m. on Thursdays through Sundays during the run of the exhibition, a single musician will emerge, “telling us their own version of the story,” says Chacon.

As the first note is played, the rear doors on the lower level of the Hall of Sculpture—which have been closed to the public for decades—will open, the music transmitting the ideas throughout the building and across disciplines.

“It will provide audiences with an opportunity to construct a kind of emotional experience with Pittsburgh’s history,” says Twist. “It’s a spiritual communication to open yourself, to open the institution up, to let people listen together and feel connected.”

The post Reconstructing History appeared first on Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh.

Ghanaian sculptor El Anatsui, whose work now spans the museum’s façade, in the Wilkinsburg studio of sculptor Dee Briggs, who fabricated Anatsui’s work. Photo: Bryan Conley

Participating artists are linked to five continents, and more than half of them live in the United States. For the first time, the majority of the artists identify with the pronoun she. And in announcing the contributors, Schaffner noted both their place of birth and residency, reflecting a world and its people in transition, as well as the idea that place can influence an artist. This movement, whether forced or by choice, is present in the artwork.

Pittsburgh has no doubt influenced four of the artists: Thaddeus Mosley, who has lived and exhibited his soaring wooden sculptures in the city for 65 years; transplants and collaborators Lenka Clayton and Jon Rubin, who will paint in a studio dedicated to turning rejection into acceptance; and generative figure Mel Bochner, whose participation is a celebratory homecoming. Also of note are the “comeback kids,” as Schaffner refers to Jeremy Deller and Kerry James Marshall, a pair of Carnegie International alumni. Marshall, who is widely considered one of the greatest living painters, is revisiting his epic narrative featuring black superheroes two decades after his comic series Rythm Mastr debuted at the 1999 Carnegie International.

Artists visited Pittsburgh, and Pittsburghers joined them in Tam O’Shanter Drawing Sessions.

From top left clockwise: Jessi Reaves (center) on Sampsonia Way in the Northside with Liz Park, associate curator of the International, and Ingrid Schaffner, curator of the International; a product of artmaking with Mimi Cherono Ng’ok; Zoe Leonard (left) and the curatorial team—Liz Park, Ashley McNelis, curatorial assistant, and Ingrid Schaffner—on Mt. Washington; Rachel Rose (left) and team looking at Pantone colors in the gallery at Carnegie Museum of Art; Yuji Agematsu (left) discusses insect pins with Robert Davidson, collection manager for invertebrate zoology at Carnegie Museum of Natural History; and participants make Pittsburgh photograms. Photos: Ashley McNelis, Chris Taylor, Sarah Hammond, Liz Park, Bryan Conley

Expect surprises in neon, both inside and on the exterior of the museum. Grab a coffee in Art Labor’s immersive hammock café, which combines research into Vietnam’s coffee industry with painting, sculpture, and sound to create a vibrant and relaxing social experience. And take home an original piece of art—one of 10,632 titles rejected from the first 35 years of the Carnegie International.

But there’s no need to wait until October to dive in, as the Carnegie International is already underway with the Tam O’Shanter Drawing Sessions, which are designed for those who can draw and those who can’t. Continuing through the run of the exhibition (October 13, 2018–March 25, 2019), these intimate adventures in artmaking led by participating artists and other contributors have already included sketching to sculptor Thaddeus Mosley’s personal collection of jazz records, and designing a garment to house an exhibition alongside pocket-museum innovator and bookmaker Dayanita Singh.

The intention of this 57th iteration of the venerable exhibition of contemporary art is “to inspire museum joy,” says Schaffner, through the simple pleasures and provocations of being with art—and other people—and making meaning from that experience. Her invitation: “Take it and play with it.”

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