Drawing from the museum’s collection alongside a selection of new commissions and loans, Unsettling Matter, Gaining Ground reflects on modernity’s reliance on fossil fuels and explores the various means by which contemporary architectural, artistic, and design practices challenge the hegemonic social, spatial, political, and economic systems that uphold mechanisms of extraction. The exhibition turns to its immediate territorial context—from the Appalachian Plateau to the subterranean beds of the Marcellus Shale—to trace the role of global logics of extraction in organizing and disrupting cities, spaces, and human and non-human communities and ecologies. Unsettling Matter, Gaining Ground, will present the iconic The Continuous Miner (1954) painting series from the museum collection in its entirety for the first time since the Heinz Galleries’ inaugural exhibition in 1975. The works presented by participating architects, artists, and collectives put forth attitudes of creative resistance and chart ways of cohabiting the planet in the face of an intensifying ecological emergency. As part of this exhibition, Carnegie Museum of Art will present public programs that bring into dialogue architects, activists, scientists, and practitioners across disciplines.
Unsettling Matter, Gaining Ground is organized by Theodossis Issaias, associate curator, Heinz Architectural Center, and Ala Tannir, curatorial research fellow, Heinz Architectural Center.
IMAGE CAPTION: Imani Jacqueline Brown, Old Gods, 2021. Framed and reflected chart of permits for coastal development, including oil and gas wells, flowlines, pipelines, and access canals in Quarantine Bay, Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana (1920-2020), mapped against antebellum Public Land Survey System (PLSS) charts (1820s-1860s). The PLSS was the first US system to plat, or divide, territory into parcels of private property. Courtesy of the artist
