The Carnegie International is the second oldest international contemporary arts exhibition in the world. Established in 1896, just one year after the Venice Biennale, the Carnegie International has a storied history. Today it is probably eclipsed by flashier, socially central (and aligned with the art market) surveys like the Whitney Biennial. Even art fairs like the New York Armory Show, Frieze London, or Art Basel Miami seem to establish the metrics of inclusion and importance once measured by the Carnegie International. It was therefore a pleasure to experience curator Ingrid Schaffner’s refreshingly idiosyncratic 57th installment of the Carnegie International. Schaffer explained, “The aim of this International is simply to inspire museum joy. Simply put: the pleasure of museums comes from the commotion of being with art and other people actively engaged in the creative work of interpretation. Draw on what you know.”¹

Andrew Carnegie founded the International to inspire local audiences and artists. Yet, it was also a way of raising Pittsburgh’s profile and achieving its nationalistic desire to be viewed as a center of modern culture as well as industry. It became a strategy for Carnegie to acquire new art for the growing collection of his new museum. With the first exhibition came the acquisition of Winslow Homer’s The Wreck (1896) and James A. McNeill Whistler’s Arrangement in Black: Portrait of Señor Pablo de Sarasate (1884), the first Whistler painting to be acquired by an American museum.

Carnegie’s initial impulse was to advance international understanding with a bilateral process of North American and European curators working and consulting together. Schaffner was born in Pittsburgh, and while perhaps a coincidence, she appears to have been the right fit for the job. Her work ethos produced a highly researched and popular exhibition. To curate and select artists, Schaffner worked with …