terra0, James “Yaya” Hough, Rafael Domenech, Tony Cokes, and the Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende (MSSA) will participate in the 58th Carnegie International

Pittsburgh, PA (March 11, 2022)– Carnegie Museum of Art announces five commissions slated for the 58th Carnegie International that will be realized at the museum and throughout the city of Pittsburgh in the lead-up to the opening day of the exhibition on September 24, 2022. The 58th Carnegie International follows the geopolitical imprint of the United States since 1945 to situate the “international” within our local context. This framework prepares a historical ground for the movements of images, ideas, objects, and people that incite emancipatory expressions and artworks. The International attempts to encourage conversations around a range of actual and representational operations—migration, appropriation, expropriation, and decolonization—and address culture’s resistance to the disruptions and dislocations generated by these interventions and their lasting effects. The exhibition features historical presentations in dialogue with the museum’s collection and new commissions presented at the museum and a number of sites across the city of Pittsburgh. The 58th Carnegie International is organized by Sohrab Mohebbi, the Kathe and Jim Patrinos Curator, and associate curator Ryan Inouye with curatorial assistant Talia Heiman; the International Curatorial Council including Freya Chou, Renée Akitelek Mboya, Robert M. Ochshorn, and Pablo José Ramírez; and curatorial advisors Thiago de Paula Souza, Arlette Quỳnh- Anh Trần, and Renan Laru-an.

Among the highlights revealed, the museum has commissioned the Berlin-based collective terra0, “a group of developers, artists, and researchers exploring the creation of hybrid ecosystems in the technosphere.” For the Carnegie International, terra0 proposes an augmented tree that owns its land. The Community College of Allegheny County in Pittsburgh is donating the land on which the tree will be planted, and the tree will regulate and govern itself through a smart contract and issue certificates of care to the museum for the services that the latter will provide during its lifetime. While this work responds to broader environmental concerns, it is particularly relevant in Pennsylvania, which lost a large percentage of its forest to the logging industry in the 19th and 20th centuries. terra0 was developed by Paul Kolling, Paul Seidler, and Max Hampshire at the Berlin University of the Arts in 2015 and has exhibited at the Berlin Schinkel Pavillon, the Shed NYC, Chronus Art Center Shanghai, and the 17th International Architecture Exhibition—La Biennale di Venezia, among others.

The museum has also invited Pittsburgh-born and based artist James “Yaya” Hough to paint a mural for the Carnegie International in Pittsburgh’s historic Hill District, a cultural and artistic hub where Hough was born. Hough, in collaboration with Carnegie Museum of Art and Nafasi, a community development initiative in the Hill District that utilizes art as a vehicle, has been holding community workshops in the lead-up to the mural unveiling which will take place later this year. This project expands on and continues Yaya’s legacy of making art public to create common imaginaries. Hough has recently worked on several high-profile projects with Mural Arts Philadelphia; was featured in the seminal exhibition “Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration” at MoMA PS1 in 2020; and opened a solo show at JTT gallery in New York in May 2021. Hough is known for his drawings that augment the absurdity of authority and confinement, nine of which the museum recently acquired in 2021. A selection of Yaya’s works will be presented in the museum galleries during the Carnegie International.

Cuban American artist Rafael Domenech will kick start the summer 2022 season on June 4 with a pavilion housed in the museum’s sculpture courtyard. Taking the shape of an ellipse, the installation invokes Cuban poet Severo Sarduy who believed that the form represents a de centering of knowledge production and expands intercultural elasticity. Made from everyday construction scaffolding and mesh that are ubiquitous signs of urban redevelopment, the pavilion further envelops the museum as a site of production. The work will serve as a venue for the second iteration of Inside Out, Carnegie Museum of Art’s summer outdoor event series that celebrates Pittsburgh’s rich cultural landscape with performances and artist-led workshops.

Artist Tony Cokes will create new work for the Carnegie International on four digital billboards on Route 28 in Pittsburgh in addition to a video installed at Carnegie Museum of Art. In Cokes’s signature style, the artist creates text-based moving and still image works featuring texts over multi- chromatic color blocks, usually accompanied by the sound of pop, experimental, industrial, and electronic music. The texts are fragments of speeches, writings, and lyrics collected from a range of sources, including politicians, comedians, and cultural theorists addressing a range of topics including racism, evil, imperialism, megalomania, and capital. Cokes surrounds audiences in a field of distraction and disjunction, fracturing and remixing language oversaturated by color and beats. This new commission will disperse his work both in and out of the museum, taking on a decentralized structure. Cokes’s work is included in numerous group exhibitions such as the Whitney Biennial 2022.

In addition to commissioning new artwork and partnering with institutions in Pittsburgh, Carnegie Museum of Art will also partner with international organizations to contextualize contemporary voices. One such partner is the Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende (MSSA), presenting a selection of their extensive collection for the first time in the United States. Celebrating its 50th anniversary in 2022, MSSA is a museum of modern and contemporary art in Chile with one of the most important collections in Latin America counting more than 2,800 artworks, a growing number thanks to the ongoing donations of works by the world’s most prominent artists. Its origins date to 1971 in Santiago, when a project arose to promote the donation of artworks from artistic circles in the Americas and Europe to Salvador Allende’s Unidad Popular (Popular Unity) government in order to create a museum for the people of Chile. Having gone from international solidarity through exile and back, MSSA is a distinctive example of artistic solidarity, generosity, and resilience and one of the world’s only major collections created exclusively from gifts by artists.

“The framework we’ve explored for this edition of the Carnegie International attempts to take a step back and look at historical work in context with contemporary commissions to trace aesthetic currents, modes of expression and abstraction that are not recuperated by the canon of the contemporary,” says Sohrab Mohebbi, the Kathe and Jim Patrinos Curator of the 58th Carnegie International. “This dialogue allows us to defy conventions, recontextualize conversations, and emphasize on traditions of artistic solidarity and cultures of resistance.”

Eric Crosby, the Henry J. Heinz II Director of Carnegie Museum of Art, adds, “The Carnegie International gives Carnegie Museum of Art the potential to transform itself against the background of American industry and history through collaboration with international curators, artists, and partners who engage with the museum through the show. Our team is thrilled to be working with such a wide ranging and globally expansive group of artistic voices that Mohebbi is bringing to the 58th Carnegie International, starting with key artist commissions and partnerships commencing this spring.”

About the Carnegie International
Established in 1896, the Carnegie International is the longest-running North American exhibition of international art. Organized every four years by Carnegie Museum of Art, the Carnegie International presents an overview of how art and artists respond to the critical questions of our time. The 58th Carnegie International, which will run from September 24, 2022 through April 2, 2023, brings together new commissions, existing works, and projects by established and emerging artists working internationally, domestically, and locally. The exhibition, which will be accompanied by a publication, will transform galleries and public spaces in the museum and occupy sites and engage publics in various Pittsburgh neighborhoods.

Since the first Carnegie International, the museum has acquired hundreds of works of art that have appeared in the exhibition series, including works by Josef Albers, Dara Birnbaum, Louise Bourgeois, Mary Cassatt, Nicole Eisenman, Isa Genzken, Dan Graham, Winslow Homer, Edward Hopper, Mike Kelley, Ellsworth Kelly, Louise Lawler, Agnes Martin, Julie Mehretu, Joan Miró, Bruce Nauman, Chris Ofili, On Kawara, Sigmar Polke, Auguste Rodin, Doris Salcedo, John Singer Sargent, Hiroshi Sugimoto, James Abbott McNeill Whistler, and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye.

Prizes awarded to Carnegie International artists include the Carnegie Prize for outstanding achievement in the exhibition in the context of a lifetime of work, and the Fine Prize for an emerging artist in the exhibition.

Support
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, 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 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, Buchanan Ingersoll and Rooney, and the Fans of the Carnegie International.

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.

Mission
Carnegie Museum of Art creates experiences that connect people to art, ideas, and one another. The museum is committed to global engagement and regional advancement. We champion creativity and its importance to society with experiences that welcome, inspire, challenge, and inform. Our core activities—collecting, conserving, presenting, and interpreting works of art—make those experiences possible. Our collection of over 34,000 works emphasizes art, architecture, photography, and design from the 19th century to the present. In addition, the museum houses the archive of more than 70,000 images by Pittsburgh photographer Charles “Teenie” Harris, whose work comprises one of the most detailed and intimate records of Black life in America. Through its programming, exhibitions, and publications, Carnegie Museum of Art frequently explores the role of art and artists in confronting key social issues of our time, combining and juxtaposing local and global perspectives. One of the four Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh, Carnegie Museum of Art was founded by industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie in 1895. To learn more, please call 412.622.3131 or visit CMOA.org.

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