For its 2023 slate of programs, the Carnegie Museum of Art will take inspiration from its long-running Carnegie International — now in its 58th iteration.

“The program builds on the incredible momentum of the Carnegie International, which is part of the collecting legacy on which the museum was founded,” said Eric Crosby, the Oakland museum’s Henry J. Heinz II director. “It began in 1896, with an exhibition from which the museum would collect from the diversity and complexity of the art of its time.

“We’re reflecting on this important legacy and really thinking about the collection as a reservoir to draw from as we imagine our collection and exhibitions moving forward.”

Although visitors tend to think of a museum’s collection only in terms of the artworks themselves, Crosby said, he sees it as encompassing much more.

Upcoming shows will activate the museum’s extensive collection — with the intention of engaging visitors — in new ways.

“I like to think of an art museum’s collection as a living archive, both of specific artworks held in the public trust, but also of the artists and the ways they’ve come through the institution and imprinted on it and left some traits of their practice within it,” he said. “Our collection represents more than the 34,000 items in storage here, so it’s an incredible reservoir of human stories.”

The 2023 program also explores the work of curators, Crosby added.

“They acquire new works for the collection, they lend works out, they research the collection, they write new interpretations of the collection,” he said. “All these different functions of how to work with the collection are at the core of the upcoming program.”

On May 27, the museum will open a survey of the work of the late San Francisco Bay-area artist, Joan Brown, from her student days in the 1950s to her death in 1990 at age 52. The exhibition will feature “The Room, Part 1,” a major Brown painting from the Carnegie’s collection.

“She was an accomplished abstract painter early on,” Crosby said. “Over the course of her practice that ended in 1990, when she died prematurely, she came to inhabit a very idiosyncratic position in painting. She started to create more cartoonish figurative paintings, many of them depicting herself — in the studio, appreciating art, out dancing, swimming.

“She came of age steeped in abstract impressionism,” he said. “Works by painters like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning were the prevailing language of painting at her time.”

Organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, “Joan Brown” will be the first major East Coast museum exhibition of her work in more than 20 years.

Contemporary artworks

The museum’s Forum series, featuring contemporary artists, will present Lyndon Barrois Jr.: Rosette, by the Carnegie Mellon University assistant professor of art, and Amie Siegel, a commissioned video work by the New York-based artist.

“They’re both keenly interested in using these exhibitions as a way to probe museum practices, to think about how artworks are conserved and cared for, and how an artist can come in and discover new meanings within these institutional practices and archives,” Crosby said.

Forum 86, running May 5-Aug. 27, will unveil new works by Barrois that use the visual language of Hollywood — film stills, posters, sets and props — to explore the heist genre, along with acts of art conservation and forgery.

Opening Sept. 22, Forum 87 will debut Siegel’s new film, stemming from research into the collections and displays of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History and exploring conventions across the fields of art, ethnography and natural history.

Beginning June 24, the museum presents “Imprinting in Their Time: Japanese Printmakers, 1912-2022,” exploring the legacy of graphic art in the wake of drastic changes in Japanese life and culture in the past century.

“We’ll be showcasing a trove of modern and contemporary Japanese prints from the collection,” Crosby said. “This is an example of how we’re looking at an aspect of the collection that is underappreciated and not very well exhibited, or known by our public or even our curators.”

Also on June 24, the museum will unveil “What Brings Us Here?,” a reinstallation of the entry gallery in the Scaife collection wing. Works from the permanent collection will invite visitors to consider how art shapes perceptions, memories and understandings of a shared place, from Pittsburgh to the region, the country and beyond.

On Aug. 19, the museum’s Heinz Architectural Center will present “Unsettling Matter, Gaining Ground,” an exhibition of diverse and unseen collection materials exploring contemporary ideas about the environment and questioning collective reliance on fossil fuels.

The last exhibition of the year, beginning Nov. 18, will showcase significant contemporary artworks from the 1980s to the 2000s, collected by Pittsburgh philanthropists and longtime Carnegie Museum supporters, Sheila and Milton Fine, and promised to the museum in 2015.

“The Milton and Sheila Fine Collection” is intended as a celebration and remembrance of Milton Fine, who passed away in 2019,” Crosby said.

A hospitality industry entrepreneur, Milton Fine was a chairman of the board of the Carnegie Museum of Art and a founder of the Andy Warhol Museum. In 2007, the Fines established The Fine Foundation, which supports projects in arts and culture, Jewish life and science and medicine, primarily in Pittsburgh.

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