Vatican Launches ArtCut Triennale: 100+ Artists Counter AI With Human Creativity

By Grace Kim

More than 100 artists — including Arthur Jafa, Jeremy Frey, and Mona Hatoum — will show work across a Vatican-organized exhibition series built around one argument: human creativity is "fundamentally human," and AI isn't.

The series is the inaugural edition of the Catholic Universities Art Triennale, or ArtCut. It spreads across seven coinciding international exhibitions, staged at Catholic universities in Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Italy, Portugal, Angola, and the United States. The whole program runs under the umbrella title Exercises in Empathy.

What's the premise?

ArtCut puts empathy and self-reflection forward as the real engines of human progress, not technological advancement. That framing comes straight from the top of the Church. Cardinal Tolentino de Mendonça, prefect of the Dicastery for Culture and Education of the Holy See, commissioned the contemporary art exhibitions at all seven universities.

The Triennale also expands on Pope Leo XIV's earlier encyclical, which called for safeguarding the human condition against AI's capacities for what the document describes as manipulation and delusional omnipotence.

The artists' brief is anchored in a specific papal claim. AI systems, the Pope asserted, "do not understand what they produce, for they lack the affective, relational and spiritual perspective through which human beings grow in wisdom." Each exhibition takes that as its starting point, focusing on defining facets of humanity — both physical and intellectual.

Who's in it, and where?

The lineup confirms the Vatican is aiming for serious contemporary-art credentials, not a devotional side project:

• Arthur Jafa, the US artist known for work on Black American experience and image culture
• Jeremy Frey, the US basketmaker recognized for pushing traditional Wabanaki craft forms
• Mona Hatoum, the London-based Palestinian artist whose installations examine displacement and the body

The exhibitions' host institutions span four continents — Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Italy, Portugal, Angola, and the United States — giving the Triennale a genuinely global footprint rather than a Rome-centric one.

What does this change for the art world?

It formalizes the Vatican as an institutional actor in the contemporary-art conversation about AI. Pope Leo XIV has already positioned the Church against AI's encroachment on creative labor, and ArtCut converts that position into an exhibition infrastructure with a recurring three-year cycle. For the participating artists, it offers a platform where the terms of the debate — empathy, wisdom, relational understanding — are set explicitly in their favor.

If the inaugural edition lands, expect the Triennale to become a fixed venue where the Church's critique of AI gets tested against, and through, contemporary practice.