Enfilade

Installation view of Fault Lines: Art, Imperialism, and the Atlantic World at the Carnegie Museum of Art, 2025 (Photo by Zachary Riggleman). Paintings include from left to right: Nicolas de Largillière, Portrait of a Woman and an Enslaved Servant, 1696 (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 03.37.2); Simon Vouet, The Toilet of Venus, ca. 1640 (Carnegie Museum of Art); and Peter Lely, Portrait of Louise Renee de Penencoet de Kerouaille, Duchess of Portsmouth, ca. 1670–1680 (Carnegie Museum of Art).

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Now on view at the Carnegie Museum of Art:

Fault Lines: Art, Imperialism, and the Atlantic World

Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, 12 July 2025 — 25 January 2026

Organized by Marie-Stéphanie Delamaire

In the wake of Europe’s imperial expansion, which included the colonization of North and South America and the Caribbean in the 16th and 17th centuries, extensive military and economic activity transformed the regions that border the Atlantic Ocean. A new world—the Atlantic World—emerged, in which wars, competitive trade, and the enslavement of millions of Africans created new societies in Africa, Europe, and the Americas.

As ideas, knowledge, and beliefs moved together with people and materials across the ocean, shaping new mindsets and understandings of the world, European elite culture singled out certain objects as art, to be appreciated primarily for their beauty and emotional power. In that process, which also led to the creation of the first art museums, a rift opened between our understanding of these works of art and the political forces and transoceanic networks that made their creation possible. Acknowledging the fault lines of art history, this exhibition explores what can be imagined when works in the collection are brought in conversation with those made by artists who lived at the fluid boundaries of the Atlantic world’s entangled empires.

The exhibition is organized by Marie-Stéphanie Delamaire, curator of European and American art.

The 20-page gallery guide can be downloaded here»