The Vatican's First Global Art Triennial Asks 100+ Artists to Find Empathy in a Machine Age
The Vatican is launching its first global contemporary art triennial this month, sending more than 100 artists across four continents to explore what art can do for the world's biggest problems.
The Catholic Universities Art Triennial — also known as ArtCut — was announced by the Dicastery for Culture and Education, the Vatican body that oversees cultural and educational initiatives, in a press release dated August 7, 2026 (Vatican Press Office). Titled "Exercises in Empathy," the project will be staged at seven Catholic universities across the Americas, Europe and Africa before concluding in Venice in 2027 (Artnet News).
The triennial kicks off in late August at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro. From there it travels to universities in Bogotá, Boston, Lisbon, Luanda, Milan and Santiago, with the Universidade Católica Portuguesa in Lisbon hosting its leg starting October 12 (Universidade Católica Portuguesa). Vatican News, which reported the announcement on August 7, described the triennial as dedicated to exploring how art addresses the most relevant issues in the world today (Vatican News).
Chief curator Nuno Crespo, who heads the School of Arts at the Catholic University of Portugal in Lisbon, is steering the project. His institution will be both the organising hub and one of the seven host venues.
The intellectual backdrop is a papal one. Pope Leo XIV issued an encyclical earlier in 2026 warning that artificial intelligence lacks the affective, relational and spiritual perspective through which human beings grow (Artnet News; Vatican). An encyclical — a formal papal letter circulated to the whole church — carries significant institutional weight, and the triennial's empathy theme reads as a direct response to that document's concerns about technology and human feeling.
What makes this stand out is the scale. The Vatican has staged major art exhibitions before, most visibly through its pavilions at the Venice Biennale. But a multi-continent triennial spread across universities — from Rio to Boston to Luanda — is a different kind of undertaking, one that uses the church's global educational network as a literal exhibition circuit rather than a single venue. It puts contemporary art into spaces that are primarily academic, and it asks those institutions to function as public art venues for the duration.
The four-continent, seven-city format also means the triennial will unfold over months rather than a single opening week. Each stop is likely to adapt the programme to its local context, though specific artist lists and individual venue programmes have not yet been detailed in the sources released so far.
For the participating artists and the universities hosting them, the project offers an unusually wide platform. The Catholic Church's higher-education network spans thousands of institutions worldwide; seven of them will now serve as stages for a conversation about art, technology and what empathy looks like when machines can simulate almost everything except the ability to care.
