Writer and curator Sohrab Mohebbi has been named curator of the Carnegie International’s 58th edition, set to open in 2022. Mohebbi, who is thirty-nine and grew up in Iran, is the first Western Asian person to helm the contemporary art survey in its 124-year history. Prior to his appointment, he served as curator at SculptureCenter in Queens, New York, and associate curator at the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater in Los Angeles.

According to Artnews, Mohebbi will focus his research around conceptions of “reconstitution” and “decentralization”; he names Chicana theorist Gloria E. Anzaldúa’s semi-autobiographical Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987) as a central text. He also plans to distribute the International across Pittsburgh, creating new partnerships between the museum and the city’s other public entities. When asked how the Covid-19 pandemic will inform his curation, Mohebbi replied: “I’m sure that whatever we do will be a document of this moment.”

This edition of the Carnegie International will be the first led by the newly appointed director Eric Crosby. While curator at SculptureCenter, Mohebbi organized the group exhibition “Searching the Sky for Rain” and a monographic Banu Cennetoğlu show (both 2019). At REDCAT, he curated solo exhibitions of work by Dave Hullfish Bailey (2018), Tamara Henderson (2016), and John Knight (2016). His 2015 REDCAT show “Hotel Theory,” which he cocurated with Ruth Estévez, received the 2013 Emily Hall Tremaine Exhibition Award.