When the Carnegie International launched in 1896, Pittsburgh was so polluted that it was referred to as ‘hell with the lid off.’ By the time Andy Warhol was an art student at Carnegie Tech in the 1940s (known today as Carnegie Mellon University), Pittsburgh’s steel mills literally rained ash, blanketing the city with soot. This year, the 59th Carnegie International returns to a city transformed by civic investment and creative resilience. Once a symbol of Rust Belt decline, Pittsburgh is now environmentally oriented, tech-savvy, and home to an arts ecosystem that is more vital than ever.

Throughout its 130-year history as the longest-running contemporary art survey in North America, the International has buttressed the Carnegie Museum of Art’s collection and its status as the country’s first institution focused on acquiring the ‘art of its time.’ Liz Park, who curated this year’s International alongside Ryan Inouye and Danielle A. Jackson, says that beyond the historical legacy, the four-year cycle and artist-centered approach give the exhibition a distinct identity. ‘One constant I see across more recent editions is the Carnegie International’s ability to really give space to artists,’ Park says. ‘Because we have more lead time, we’re able to invite artists earlier on, and entrust them to make something of the time and resources available to them.’ Titled ‘If the word we’, this year’s edition features 61 artists and collectives, the largest to date.

In a notable break from tradition, the 59th Carnegie International also includes four off-site venues, including the storied Mattress Factory. In the late 1970s, when Pittsburgh’s steel industry collapsed and its real estate market cratered, artist Barbara Luderowski converted a defunct mattress factory on the city’s North Side into DIY exhibition spaces with a prescient curatorial vision: Keith Haring had a studio there in 1977, James Turrell’s permanent installations opened in 1983, and Yayoi Kusama’s permanent Infinity Dots Mirrored Room followed in 1996. ‘We’re known for engaging with the making process, and we don’t always know how a new commission will turn out,’ says David Oresick, the Mattress Factory’s executive director. ‘So there are a lot of questions: How big is this room? How high are the ceilings? Can we cut a hole in the floor? Our motto is that we always say yes to artists.’

For the International, Peruvian-born, Amsterdam-based artists Claudia Martínez Garay and Arturo Kameya were given a three-story house, one of Mattress Factory’s properties scattered across the neighborhood. Their installation includes videos and architectural interventions that reference Peru’s political turmoil and Indigenous histories, overlapping narratives that gesture toward broader geopolitical discord. ‘At this time, it’s very important to build relationships and be more open to “the other,”’ Garay says, ‘whoever that is.’

Not long after the Mattress Factory’s founding, the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust was established in 1984 to revive neglected areas of downtown through galleries, theaters, and public art, including a plaza displaying permanent sculptures by Louise Bourgeois. This spring, the Cultural Trust celebrates its latest achievement, Arts Landing, a USD 31 million outdoor civic space in the heart of the Cultural District. Among the artists featured in Arts Landing’s inauguration is legendary sculptor and Pittsburgh native Thaddeus Mosley, whose career was galvanized by the 2018 Carnegie International, and who sadly passed away this spring just shy of his 100th birthday. Mosley’s cast bronze totems, which blend elements of African tribal arts with the formalism of Brancusi and Noguchi, exemplify the spirit of ‘Rust Belt Modernism’ and its commitment to the tools, textures, and grit-infused work ethic associated with Pittsburgh’s post-industrial redemption.

Anastasia James, Director of Galleries & Public Art at Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, says ‘Mosley’s legacy expands the narrative of who defines Pittsburgh’s artistic identity – almost at the opposite end of the spectrum of Andy Warhol. Where Warhol engages mass media reproduction and glamour, Mosley is grounded in material, process, and humility. Together, they open up a much broader understanding of what this city has produced culturally.’

Pittsburgh’s factories subconsciously shaped Warhol’s assembly-line production style and Pop Art philosophy. In 1967, the same year Warhol’s Factory Additions published his iconic Marilyn Monroe portfolio of silkscreen prints, he was featured in the Carnegie International. Today, his namesake museum on the city’s North Shore boasts the largest collection of original Warhols worldwide, often juxtaposed with ambitious exhibitions by contemporary artists, including MFA students from CMU’s acclaimed School of Art.

‘Like Warhol, Pittsburgh is constantly reinventing itself, but in a less linear, more cyclical fashion,’ says The Andy Warhol Museum’s director Mario R. Rossero. He is also overseeing the USD 60 million development of the Pop District, which will bolster the museum’s mission of community engagement and arts education.

‘If Pittsburgh were situated somewhere in the heart of Europe, tourists would eagerly journey hundreds of miles out of their way to visit it,’ wrote critic Brendan Gill in 1989. ‘Its setting is spectacular: between high bluffs, where the Monongahela River and the Allegheny River meet to form the Ohio.’ Pittsburgh’s waterways have inspired generations of artists, a confluence of scenic beauty and sociopolitical significance. Local artist Shikeith is currently working on Project Blue Space, a multimedia public art platform underwritten by a USD 250,000 Mellon Foundation grant, which mines the city’s rich legacy of Black culture in relation to its bodies of water and the double meaning of the word ‘blue’ – from the Ohio River’s critical role in the Underground Railroad to the public pools and blues-filled jazz clubs of the city’s Hill District, once known as ‘Little Harlem.’

Shikeith first moved to Pittsburgh in 2014 for an artist residency at Bunker Projects. He calls the city ‘his Cinderella story’ and points to an early grant from the Heinz Endowments that supported his experimental documentary #Blackmendream (2014), now hosted by the Criterion Channel and screened at museums such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York City and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. His work continues Pittsburgh’s legacy of Black photojournalism, prolifically encapsulated by the Charles ‘Teenie’ Harris Archive, a trove of more than 75,000 photographs, housed at the Carnegie Museum of Art, that captures Harris’s community’s daily life from the 1930s to the 1980s with radical tenderness.

This lineage of Black artistic production resonates across Pittsburgh’s cultural infrastructure, including the August Wilson African American Cultural Center, the Kelly Strayhorn Theater, and Alma | Lewis, among others. ‘Pittsburgh is fertile ground for artists,’ Shikeith says. The city’s abundance of space and resources empowers artists ‘to engage the public in a way that is generative, and with the institutional support to make things happen.’

During the Gilded Age, Pittsburgh’s captains of industry – Carnegie, Frick, Mellon – amassed fortunes and cemented their legacies by endowing museums and universities across the city. Today, arts philanthropy in Pittsburgh takes many forms. Local patron and artist Henry J. Simonds, whose residency Pedantic has hosted almost 200 creatives since its founding in 2022, believes Pittsburgh’s artistic community gravitates ‘towards an ethical aesthetic,’ one that values creative reuse and restorative practices. Collector Evan Mirapaul, founder of the Troy Hill Art Houses, echoes this sentiment. ‘Philanthropy begins next door,’ he says. Over the past 15 years, Mirapaul purchased four homes in his neighborhood and commissioned artists to create permanent, immersive installations, such as Mark Dion’s Mrs. Christopher’s House (2024), and the beguiling Darkhouse Lighthouse (2022) by local artist duo Lenka Clayton and Phillip Andrew Lewis, who erected a functioning lighthouse inside a home gutted by fire.

In Pittsburgh’s growing art scene, collective memory, dignified struggle, and shared progress cultivate meaning and belonging. Throughout the city’s recent history – from its steel town heyday to its post-industrial crisis, and now, as a vibrant cultural destination – the International has served as a leitmotif, channeling the zeitgeist and the city’s shifting identity. Nowhere is this more apt than at Pittsburgh’s recently overhauled airport, where visitors to the International arriving via plane will be welcomed by Alexander Calder’s 500-pound mobile, titled simply Pittsburgh (1958). The modernist icon, an enduring homage to the city’s many evolutions, was originally created for the International.