The 1991 Carnegie International in Pittsburgh marked a turning point for the integration of large-scale installation into major U.S. art museums, as artists such as Christian Boltanski and Sophie Calle produced site-responsive works that engaged directly with the museum’s records and collections. As curator Lynne Cooke observed, many of these installations highlighted the arbitrariness of museum classifications while foregrounding what remains absent from official histories, positioning absence as both material and subject. This presentation links the 1991 exhibition to the 2018 iteration of the Carnegie International, in which Lenka Clayton and Jon Rubin revisited the museum’s extensive records through their collaborative project Fruit and Other Things. The project involved hand-painted reproductions of titles of works rejected from previous Carnegie Internationals, each displayed for a single day before being given away to visitors. Reading this project in relation to the 1991 exhibition, I trace the Carnegie International as a crucial site for exploring absence within the encyclopedic museum, where artists transform the institution from a repository of objects into a stage for reflecting on its own omissions.

About the Speaker: Shawn C. Simmons is a third-year Ph.D. student in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh. His research interests center on modern and contemporary art, with a focus on museological critique, queer and feminist art histories, archival studies, and visual cultures of science and technology. His current research project examines how contemporary British artists engage institutional aesthetics to question how museums construct history and cultural memory. He holds a B.A. in Art History from New York University and an M.A. in Art History from the University of Colorado Boulder.

Image: A record of paintings submitted to the Carnegie International by Alice Worthington Ball