Being a part of the four Carnegie Museums is like having a big, wide window to the world— past, present, and future—with a view that’s always changing.

Some views from Carnegie Museums’ window, captured in this issue of Carnegie magazine: faces that tell stories about the human condition; children in parts of the world still battling polio; a fledgling art community in our own backyard; and scenery that lined the path of Lewis and Clark.
Photos by: (left to right) Don Robinson,Sebastião Salgado, Design Zone, Bob Jennings.

Looking in the mirror is never as interesting as looking out the window. We learn this early on, when the figure in the mirror that so fascinated us as infants suddenly becomes all-too-familiar and, well, boring.

Being a part of the four Carnegie Museums is like having a big, wide window to the world—past, present, and future—with a view that’s always changing. Through this window, we get to see things we might otherwise never have the chance to see. And we gain interesting new perspectives on the seemingly familiar: things we thought we knew but never really understood at all.

It’s a mighty tall order to try to replicate what the four Carnegie Museums do on the pages of a magazine, but that was our motivation in this latest redesign of Carnegie magazine. There’s a big world out there, starting with our own big and diverse region. Through the work of our directors, scientists, curators, exhibitions and collections staff, and educators, Carnegie Museums is constantly observing, studying, and participating in what’s going on outside our window. And that’s what we want to capture on the pages of Carnegie magazine.

So, in addition to giving you, our members, timely information about what’s happening at your museums, we want to spend some time each issue giving you a look through the Carnegie Museums window. We’ve created a number of regular departments to help us accomplish our goal. And our feature stories will cover a mix of exhibition profiles and discussions of issues that matter to the region and, therefore, to us.

In this first issue of the “new” Carnegie magazine, in our Face Time interview, Don Robinson talks about how most of us really never stop and look at the world. He knows. He’s been
a successful businessman all his life, but until he began dedicating more time to his great passion, photography, he says he never “really looked” at the world around him.

Really looking isn’t always easy. It takes a little more time, a lot more thought, and a willingness to sometimes see things that aren’t always to our liking. The four Carnegie Museums help us do this every day. Carnegie magazine hopes, in some small way, to do the same.
It’s a whole lot more interesting than looking in the mirror.

Betsy Momich
Editor

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