Where Do We Stand?

Where Do We Stand? is an ongoing exhibition at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, located in Scaife Gallery 17. It brings together artworks that reflect on the artists' place in time and history, framing the land as a teacher that urges us to ground ourselves and to know where we stand in relation to a mutable world. The artists represent land as powerful, sacred, bountiful, and beautiful, while addressing human histories of violence, the dispossession of its Indigenous stewards, and forced agricultural labor. The show spans from Robert S. Duncanson to Cauleen Smith.

What makes this more than just a single gallery is the scale of the project it belongs to. Where Do We Stand? is part of the museum's most ambitious undertaking in two decades: a total rethinking of how its collection is displayed and interpreted across 40,000 square feet of the Scaife wing. The museum is repositioning more than 100,000 artworks as a 21st-century resource, and this gallery is one piece of that larger shift. The project began in 2023 and is planned to run through 2027, pausing during the Carnegie International, the longest-running survey of international contemporary art in America.

Because it's part of an ongoing overhaul, you can see how this specific room fits into the museum's broader effort to re-examine its collection. The exhibition is supported by the Drue and H. J. Heinz II Charitable Trust, with major support from the Henry Luce Foundation. You'll find it in Scaife Gallery 17 at the Carnegie Museum of Art, and since it's an ongoing exhibition, you can drop in whenever you're around the museum.