Jonathan González: Visiting Artist Lecture

Join us for an evening with artist Jonathan González as they share an in-depth look at their practice and the work featured in If the word we: 59th Carnegie International. Lectures are free and open to the public. The Strikebreakers The Strikebreakers is a new site-specific, four-hour performance conceived for the Grand Staircase of Carnegie Museum of Art. Performed by five dancers over five consecutive days, the work unfolds as a slow transformation of bodies, relationships, and collective attention, using the museum’s architecture as both stage and collaborator. Drawing its title from the complicated history of labor, industry, and Western Pennsylvania, The Strikebreakers does not seek to reenact a historical event. Instead, it approaches the figure of the worker as a choreographic proposition: a body shaped by repetition, endurance, care, fatigue, solidarity, and the continual negotiation between individual agency and collective responsibility. Historical archives surrounding labor movements and Black social life circulate throughout the work not as illustrations, but as conditions that quietly inform its movement, rhythm, and atmosphere. The performance is less concerned with representing history than with asking how history continues to move through bodies in the present. The title also resonates with the legacy of the 1892 Homestead Strike and the histories of labor surrounding Andrew Carnegie’s industrial empire, while opening the work toward broader questions of collective action and social choreography. About the Artist Jonathan González (b. 1988, Queens, NY; lives in New York, NY) is an interdisciplinary artist whose work spans choreography, sound, image, writing, video, and collective practice. Their artistic research engages themes of memory, Black geographies, and African diasporic temporalities, often through site-specific and durational performance. By combining movement, sound, and image, González creates works that explore embodiment as both a recor