RJ Messineo: Carnegie Mellon University School of Art Visiting Lecture Series

RJ Messineo will be at the Kresge Theatre on Tuesday, October 20, for a visiting lecture that's part of the CMU School of Art's Visiting Artist Lecture Series. The talk is co-presented by the Carnegie Museum of Art and the school, and it centers on the work Messineo is showing in If the word we, the 59th Carnegie International, which runs at the Carnegie Museum of Art from May 2, 2026, through January 3, 2027. The museum has described this edition as the most collaborative and far-reaching to date.

Messineo was born in 1980 in Hartford, Connecticut, and lives in Greenfield, Massachusetts. They make paintings that combine observation and abstraction, and over the last six years they've developed a particular way of working: attaching thin wooden boards to the surfaces of their canvases with magnets. That's a specific detail to keep in mind if you're going to see the work in person—the physical construction is as much a part of the piece as the painting itself.

On the credentials side, Messineo earned an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2009 and a BFA from Cornell University in 2002. They're a Shandaken: Paint School Fellow and completed the Fire Island Artist Residency in 2014. Their work is in the permanent collection of the Dallas Museum of Art.

Since the lecture is built around the work they're showing in the Carnegie International, it's a good chance to hear them talk through the process behind the paintings you can see at the museum. The talk runs from 5:30 to 7 PM at the Kresge Theatre in the CMU College of Fine Arts, and it's free and open to the public.