Ooh boy, folks, we are back with another museum entry and it is a doozy! Because it has already(!) been four years, and North America’s longest-running contemporary international art exhibition is back again at CMOA for its fifty-ninth iteration! I actually went at the start of the month during opening week, but as that was the same week that I decided to attempt Brie-pocalypse, I put this entry off for today. After the dynamism and breadth of the 2022 International, I wasn’t sure if this curation team would be able to top it, but I am happy to report that this year’s International is bigger and bolder than ever. More and new spaces utilized! More a/v installations! Just more of everything! So much so that I’m genuinely glad that the International is live for another eight months because there is simply too much to take in during a single visit.

Somewhere along the line, one of the docents remarked that I must be liking what I was seeing because I had the biggest smile as I walked around. And while unbeknownst to her that that’s kind of my default Museum Face, she wasn’t wrong. I was simply electrified by everything around me—a state that’s usually difficult for me to get to at all but the largest museums, where there’s just so much to take in. I get to a point where I’m almost vibrating on a different wavelength, and though I don’t pretend to have understood everything that I saw (one of the intellectual beauties of modern art), I wanted to do what I did the last time and just highlight some pieces that put that stupid grin on my face so that all of you can get a taste.

It took us over half an hour to get out of the entrance hallway, because there was so much to look at right away. South African artist Dineo Seshee Bopape’s multimedium installation Fiela, fiela (I’ve come to take you home) has taken over the Forum Gallery, dominated by a small maze of mud sculpture walls and projected images of trees and flowers. One of the interesting features of the International is that some pieces will provide you with details about how to interpret them, and others won’t, so you have to come to your own conclusions. Fiela is one of the latter, and that’s ok. I think it’s more important to stop and sit with art sometimes, rather than coming to some particular interpretative endpoint with it.

Fiela was one of those pieces that I was simply drawn to beyond specific ideas; if there had been fewer other people, I could have wandered back and in forth in the cramped Forum Gallery for another half an hour probably, just soaking in the ambience. Maybe it triggered my subconscious’s memories of being in South Africa, or perhaps it reminded me of mud-wall rooms I stayed at in Kenya. It’s hard to see, but the mud and dirt are partially designed to flake and fall off (there are posted warnings to watch out for falling mud). One interpretation of Fiela is as a record, as the vast majority of International pieces are for one reason or another, of fragility and impermanence. Be that environmental, social, or both.

The title of this year’s International is If the word we, where ‘we’ is not only a unifying word, but also a “porous” and “complex” term that reflects a current geopolitical reality that seems to want to place firm boundaries on who or what is encompassed by it. Like the 2022 International, the 2026 version sees art as a force of, if not unity, at least a puncture point in the plans of those who look to build barriers between us.

We move fifty feet forward to the Hall of Sculpture and to one of the few pieces that I was “spoiled” on before I arrived, but a preview glimpse of Brazilian artist Cinthia Marcelle’s Green Hall Annex only whet my appetite to see it in person. I couldn’t believe that they managed to top the balloon and photography installation of right? and Hiroshima Triology from four years ago as a dynamic use of this wonderful space, but here we are. Marcelle uses architecture within architecture to comment on violence and power, using green carpet of the model used in Chamber of Deputies and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Brazil, recently renovated following damage from antidemocratic protests, which covers an underside plastered with pages from the Jornal da Câmara, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and other American and Brazilian media talking about this event, January 6th, and other fascist violence.

From the Hall of Sculpture’s balcony, the frissons and dissension are covered by the officious bureaucratic carpet, and even at eye level, the marbleesque columns lend the structure of democracy a grandeur in keeping with the facades of order in the western world, often exemplified by the “restrained” beauty of the classical art that lives in the hall. It’s only by looking deeper, investigating further, that we see the dissent and disunion beneath.

Okay, the first part of Robinson’s installation is where I started to lose my mind (affirming). Look at this whimsy! Taking the unavoidable tweeness of Sarah Scaife’s rich lady antique miniatures of her rich lady mansion and turning it into… this! What an inspired use of a usually flyover space! Not only taking a glorified closet and filling it with resin and bone butterflies (moths?), but changing the miniature room tableaus into almost microscopic worlds unto themselves. As genderfluid two-spirited Karuk/Yurok artist, Robinson uses traditional coastal native crafts like basket and bead work (we’ll see more up top when I go back to the Sculpture balcony) and transforms it into what they refer to not interdisciplinary art, but rather “antidiscplinary” art, something without static boundaries or labels.

Back in the Miniature Gallery, I was just getting a grip on myself when we exited into the Hall of Architecture and found—lo and behold—that it was being used as more than storage space!

Just like the Miniature Gallery, this year’s International finally thought to use the dramatic staging of the museum’s most underutilized (unless it’s the holidays…) space! Unfortunately, though I hunted around my favorite haunt looking for the artist (or heck, the title) of this film installation, I didn’t find it, and frankly I was so arrested by the visual contrasts that I gave up pretty soon to just let it wash over me. There was an extended visualization of the character of Carmen as a fictional construct, but it also tied in with bull fighting and industrialized labor. Loved the contrasts again with its Classico-medieval setting, and how the contrasts weren’t as seismic as you might imagine.

God, we’ve barely made it off the ground floor yet… because we also got waylaid at the bottom of the Grand Staircase—a nontraditional installation space that was used last time around, mainly for feminist icon Kate Millet’s mannequins and Daniel Lie’s natural fiber tapestry work. This year, we have another stop-in-your-tracks piece of meaningful whimsy: Hyun Nahm’s Puppeteer (Archipelago).

Made of polyurethane resin, sulfur, and insects, Puppeteer is another installation with so many tiny parts that you have to spend a long time taking it in. Nahm is Korean, but this piece was born during an artist’s residency in Indonesia and his fascination, much like Miller Robinson, with so-called “miniscapes” (縮景). Taking snapshots of urban decay and postcapitalist ruin, the focal point of Puppeteer (Archipelago) is melting sculpture of motorcycle parts rendered amorphous by Indonesian volcanic sulfur. But branching out from this in a scattered eruption are dozens of suspended resin cubes filled with small manmade objects, mineral samples, and preserved insects. Indonesia is equatorial, but the resin boxes are arranged to mimic the placement of the northern constellations as a juxtaposition of capital and divisions of labor that often characterize the line between the global north and south.

After Puppeteer, we can finally head up to the second floor, and I’m going to have to rapid-fire a little more to keep this any kind of reasonable length. But that’s not a terrible thing as upstairs in the galleries, most of the pieces are staged in much more traditional, though still interesting ways.

As I said though, this feels like only a slice of everything I saw, and if you’re anywhere near the greater Pittsburgh metro area, I really can’t recommend enough that you come down and check it out for yourself. I love the International because its perspectives are always challenging in the best way, and it’s a wonderful way to connect with the wider global art scene without leaving Western Pennsylvania. Heck, even if you’re not a local, the International is on until January 3rd next year, and it might be worth the trip (come during the holidays and find out with me what they plan to do about that huge projector screen in the middle of their Christmas tree space in the Hall of Architecture!)

That probably won’t be the only thing afoot, either… because over in CMNH, they took down the giant fiberglass statues of Seti I and Horus outside Walton Hall, so you know the Egypt renovations are picking up their pace. Not to mention that its equally-problematic neighbor, the Wyckoff Hall of Arctic Life, beat my lowball estimate by two years and is closing down for long term major retooling at the end of June. So much change and excitement to look forward to!