Carnegie museum’s exterior will be canvas for some artists

Artwork created specifically for the exterior of Oakland’s Carnegie Museum of Art will greet visitors when the 57th Carnegie International opens Oct. 13.

Artists from New York City, the Bahamas, Nigeria and Kenya will create site-specific works for the 122-year-old exhibition, the oldest showcase of contemporary art in North America.

A large work by El Anatsui will span the museum’s facade, which measures 30 feet by 160 feet. The artwork will incorporate discarded metal caps from liquor bottles and colorful printing plates from Knepper Press in Clinton, Pa. El Anatsui, who works in Nigeria, aims to connect old and new, color and light, Africa and America in this work. The piece will be fabricated by local sculptor Dee Briggs in her studio, a converted firehouse in Wilkinsburg. Ms. Briggs’ neighbors will help fabricate the artwork.

Tavares Strachan, a conceptual artist from the Bahamas, likes to discover people and objects that were left out of official records and the artistic canon.

Mimi Cherono Ng’ok is a photographer from Kenya whose travels have included visits to Abidjan, Accra, Berlin, Dakar, Johannesburg, Kampala, Kigali and Nairobi. She thinks of her photographs as a kind of emotional cartography and uses her camera to explore the space between memory and imagination. She will pair her wellknown portrait of a white horse in a red halter on a beach with another image, print it on wallpaper and install it in the museum’s lobby.

Park McArthur, a New York City artist, will create a soundbased artwork. Ms. McArthur sent a sound engineer to record the ambient sounds in a quarry that was the source of stones used to build the museum’s Scaife galleries. The Larvikite rock from Norway is valued for its pearlescent luster. Visitors who arrive at the museum through its back entrance and outdoor sculpture courtyard will hear the soundscape.