Photo: Joshua Franzos

Carnegie Museums recently introduced “Carnegie Nexus,” a new interdisciplinary event series that explores pressing issues   of the day from a wide range of current perspectives. It’s among the most exciting things I’ve had the chance to tell you about!

The inaugural Carnegie Nexus offering, starting in January 2017, is titled Strange Times: Earth in the Age of the Human, with a focus on what it means for all of us to live in an environment profoundly shaped by human activity. (See page 26.) Future series will take up different topics, but the model will be the same: Carnegie Museums experts joining forces with artists, academics, performers, journalists, and others to explore a timely issue through the lenses of art, science, history, music, theater, literature, public policy, and other disciplines. There will be surprises, challenges, and insights in each event—and for those who participate in a series as a whole, a dynamic examination of multiple ways of seeing an essential question of contemporary life.

Not long ago, when we were in the early stages of planning the Strange Times series, I was stuck in construction-related traffic when I turned up the radio and happened to catch an interview with Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Proulx about her new novel, Barkskins. As she discussed her vision of the relationship between specific human beings and specific trees—in some sense an actual war between those human beings and those trees—I began to wish the traffic jam would continue long enough for me to hear everything she had to say. Shortly after, I noticed that the cover story of TIME Magazine was about the “Anthropocene,” a newly-coined scientific term for the era in which human activity is visible in the earth’s geological layers. It seems that the question—What have we done to the world we live in?—is everywhere.   In the car, scanning a magazine stand, skimming the online headlines, or reading book reviews, I—like all of us—find the topic of our species’ impact on the environment that sustains us coming insistently to the fore.

We at Carnegie Museums are fortunate to have two science museums and two art museums in the family, leading universities as our neighbors, and countless cultural organizations across the city as potential partners. With Carnegie Nexus we are leveraging all of these resources to bring the public exciting and innovative events curated to shed light on important topics, from a variety of perspectives and for a variety of audiences. Join us for as much of Strange Times as you possibly can! (For the full schedule, and for ticketing, visit