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The Carnegie International Tests What “We” Still Means in a Fractured World

It may lack a singular, clearly articulated thesis, but the survey nonetheless presents a sequence of strong voices forming a synced chorus enacting a compelling notion of collectivity.

This is a year of closely watched biennials, from the late Koyo Kouoh’s historic Venice Biennale to the Whitney Biennial in New York. If 2026 is the year we might just begin to understand where things are heading and grasp the broader state of the world, then this unusual concentration of exhibitions, combined with ongoing geopolitical shifts, offers a compelling testing ground—both at a human and an artistic level.

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Now in its 59th edition, the Carnegie International is the oldest survey of contemporary art in the United States, dating back to 1896, when it was founded by industrialist Andrew Carnegie as part of a broader project to turn Pittsburgh into a cultural capital, “as famous for art as it is for steel.” It was a very different city at the time, in a very different United States. One can still read both ambition and optimism in its architecture, its neo-Gothic-inspired buildings transitioning seamlessly into the Gilded Age industrial skyscrapers of the 1920s. In that sense, Pittsburgh in some ways feels closer to Germany or Switzerland, its historic buildings recalling a time when the city was bursting with international energies and voices, drawn by its role as a major industrial and cultural hub in the U.S.

From the outset, the Carnegie International was conceived not simply as a museum or a taste-making national exhibition, but as an educational instrument: a recurring survey of contemporary art from around the world that would both elevate public taste and build the collection of the Carnegie Museum of Art through strategic acquisitions. This explains why the Carnegie International remains anchored within its institution and its local community: the show is presented within the museum’s collection, with the exception of a few off-sites. It has, however, partnered this year for the first time with other local institutions—the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh, Kamin Science Center, Mattress Factory and the Thelma Lovette YMCA—that function as entry points to different segments of the city’s community. Among the goals of the Carnegie International, as director Eric Crosby put it, is “to make Pittsburgh a place where art happens.”

At the center of the 2026 edition is the title “If the word we,” which emerged from a collaboration and dialogue with writer Haytham el-Wardany. Curators Ryan Inouye, Danielle A. Jackson and Liz Park chose to involve him not only as an advisor—which is becoming more common—but as a participant in the thinking process itself, as they noted during the presentation. While this is not always immediately legible in the exhibition, the text commissioned from el-Wardany ultimately set the tone and the overall approach: thinking as a collective of diverse voices, more attuned to teaching others and to their surroundings. The curatorial team, in turn, began to think collectively, eventually assembling a similarly diverse global chorus. “We as a unified subject” became the key thread—banal as it may read, difficult as it is in practice—which, in today’s fragmented and divided society, makes it all the more urgent and relevant. “What if the word ‘we’ becomes a space for listening?” el-Wardany offers in his text. “We” is deliberately adopted here, a complex and heterogeneous position from which the three of us navigate contradictions of life while being receptive to the frequencies of our surroundings.

Concurrently, the curators intentionally focused on familiar forms, framing them as an open invitation for diverse audiences to engage with the exhibition and actively contribute to the production of meaning. As a result, the quadrennial begins in public spaces and lobbies, treating these transitional zones as integral to the exhibition itself, with installations staged before the galleries. One of the first encounters is a collaborative project by Elle-Máijá Apiniskim Tailfeathers, Hans Ragnar Mathisen and Joar Nango, all of whom are connected to Norway. Mathisen is particularly known for his 1975 map of Sápmi, which envisioned a borderless homeland for the Indigenous Sámi across northern Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia. Architect and artist Joar Nango extends this approach into a spatial proposition that accompanies Apiniskim Tailfeathers’ video storytelling of Mathisen’s life, resulting in a lively entanglement where shared authorship, as much as lived experience, becomes central to the work.

On the main floor are easy-to-approach but no less structurally and poetically elaborated ikebana-inspired sculptures by Japanese artist Kenjiro Katayama. There is beauty in the composition, but also a subtle sense of transience in the awareness that these materials will mutate over time and decay, making the sculpture ephemeral and transitional, as with most human creations.

Next is a tree-like sculpture by Sofu Teshigahara, founder of the radical Sogetsu school of ikebana, which reimagined the centuries-old art of Japanese flower arrangement in dialogue with modern life, architecture and shifting ways of inhabiting the world. The presentation traces Teshigahara’s practice across materials and forms—wood, metal, ink, sculpture, calligraphy—always filtered through ikebana poetry. At its center, Yakumo........

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