2026–27 Call for Art Theme: Home
In its fourth year, Envisioning a Just Pittsburgh returns home.
What began as a shared experiment across Carnegie Museums, The Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, and The University of Pittsburgh now enters a new chapter, with the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh coming on as a partner and Carnegie Museums resuming its role as lead partner for this regional Call for Art. Anchored by our community partners, The August Wilson African American Cultural Center and 1Hood Media, this moment invites both reflection and possibility. It asks us to consider not only where we have been, but how we want to be together moving forward.
This year’s theme, Home, invites artists and partners to explore what it means to belong, to feel grounded, and to imagine Pittsburgh as a place where everyone can live and thrive.
Across Carnegie Museums, conversations about home are already unfolding through exhibitions, programs, and partnerships that consider belonging, memory, and return. This Call for Art extends that inquiry outward, centering community voices and lived experience across the region.
This year, we invite artists to respond to Home as both a question and a practice.
We encourage new submissions that explore:
Pittsburgh as home.
- Is home another place, remembered or longed for?
- Coming home to oneself, to one’s body, or to one’s history.
- Is home a community, a language, or a feeling rather than a location?
- Immigration, refugee experiences, and the many ways people create home in Pittsburgh.
- What does it mean to make Home in a place where you are told you don’t belong?
- Homemaking as Resistance.
For many, home is shaped by cycles of movement, migration, displacement, rebuilding and return. For others, it is built through care, kinship, and collective effort. Home can be a site of comfort and safety, but also of tension, loss, or unfinished work. It can be deeply personal and profoundly political at the same time.
We know that Pittsburgh has the potential to feel like home for everyone, using our imaginations we want to envision that future for all. We also recognize that this has not always been the case. Like many cities, Pittsburgh continues to grapple with inequities that shape who feels welcomed, who feels safe, and who has access to stability across economic, environmental, mental, and physical dimensions of life.
To support artists and art-makers in this exploration, Envisioning a Just Pittsburgh will offer a series of community workshops from June through October. These workshops are designed to create space for artists to reflect, experiment, and develop their ideas in conversation with others, reinforcing the belief that making home and imagining justice are collective acts.
Making a home is a collective act.
This Call for Art is grounded in the belief that art is a vital tool for shaping belonging and possibility. Through visual art, writing, performance, and interdisciplinary work, artists help us see what justice looks like when it is lived, felt, and shared. They help us imagine a city that welcomes people from every corner of the world and makes room for many definitions of home.
As this initiative returns to Carnegie Museums, we do so with deep gratitude for the partners, artists, and communities who have carried Envisioning a Just Pittsburgh forward. This year marks a full cycle of collaboration and a renewed commitment to creating space for artists to lead us in imagining what home can be.
We invite community artists across the region to submit new work that is bold, authentic, and rooted in care. Artists are encouraged to draw from lived experience, community sharing, memory, storytelling, research, and imagination to help us collectively envision a more just and equitable Pittsburgh. We invite our partners to continue shaping this project alongside us, strengthening the connections between culture, community, and justice.
Together, we ask:
How can Pittsburgh be a just and equitable home for all?
Awards Categories
Writing for the Page: Short Story, Poetry, Personal Essay, Flash Fiction
Visual Art: 2D, 3D, Painting, Photography, Sculpture, Fiber Art, Graphic Design
Performance: Music, Dance, Slam Poetry, Spoken Word
Video & Interdisciplinary: Works that cross categories, Mixed Media, Digital Art
Youth Arts (Grade 6th–8th and Grade 9th–12th):
All categories including:
• Writing for the Page
• Visual Art
• Performance
• Video & Interdisciplinary
