Our Galleries are Changing

Dear friends,

There are some changes afoot. A museum is an always-changing place as each of us brings our own perspective across the threshold and chooses to welcome art into our lives. But here, the change I’m referring to is an exciting transformation of the museum’s collection galleries!

For a very long time, Carnegie Museum of Art’s collection has been presented in an exclusively chronological fashion, with Old Master paintings in the first gallery and contemporary art in the last. While we may glean a lot from a linear history of art, there are so many other questions to ask of this collection. You ask them every time you step into the museum. Rest assured, we are asking them too.

Right now, the museum is undertaking its most ambitious multi-year project to date. It involves a total rethinking of the collection’s display and interpretation, spanning 40,000 square feet of the museum’s Scaife wing. What does that entail? Oh, just a reconsideration of over 100,000 artworks across all time periods, mediums, and disciplines! That’s no small feat. The museum staff is hard at work to bring forward new interdisciplinary and creative ideas to reposition the collection as an even more relevant 21st-century resource.

In 2023 we initiated this reinstallation with What Brings Us Here?, a display of artworks in our main entry gallery that serves to welcome visitors with new connections and vibrant formal relationships, honoring a wide range of artistic voices represented in the collection. After all, the opportunity to discover connections—between artworks and each other—is at the core of what a museum can offer.

In 2024 we continued this work by opening a new gallery dedicated to the Pittsburgh-born photojournalist Charles “Teenie” Harris (1908–1998) who created indelible images for the Pittsburgh Courier, one of the nation’s most prominent Black newspapers. His complete archive of nearly 80,000 photographic negatives is one of the most important resources we steward. And this presentation—for the first time in the museum’s history—showcases the archive’s full scope of materials, including photographs, ephemera, moving images, oral histories, and newly digitized color pictures.

Throughout 2025–2027, additional galleries will periodically close and reopen with new installations, rarely exhibited artworks, and old favorites in new contexts. A museum that explores important questions invites conversations and you can expect many galleries and installations to spark dialogue. We will begin to narrate a more thorough history of the museum’s Carnegie International, the longest running survey of international contemporary art in America. We will surface important themes such as power, representation, technology, perception, media, the role of the museum, and our relationship to the land. We will also embrace a more diverse range of artistic positions across geographies and time periods than ever before. These are just some of the new points of entry into the collection we hope to explore with you.

We look forward to sharing these ongoing transformations of the museum every step of the way. In the meantime, thank you for your patience as galleries close and reopen. Trust me. The results will be eye-opening and well worth the wait.

Yours,

Eric Crosby
Henry J. Heinz II Director, Carnegie Museum of Art
Vice President, Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh

In Our Collection Galleries

gallery featuring rocks in the center
Ongoing

Recognizing that a museum is a place to gather for art, conversations, ideas, and social interactions, this gallery foregrounds works that invite visitors to explore how art shapes perceptions, memories, and understandings of a shared place.

two museum visitors looking at object apart of Inheritance exhibition
Ongoing

The artworks chosen for this gallery span different periods in the museum’s collecting history. Through their selection and their relation to each other, the artworks invite reflections, questions, and conversations about the social and personal dimensions of inheritance, gifts, and exchange.

an art gallery with a red wall and many paintings
Ongoing

520 artworks and counting acquired from Carnegie Internationals have helped shape the very identity of the museum as a constantly evolving institution. Presented here is a small selection of those works that narrate different chapters of the exhibition series.

Ongoing

This gallery is an expansive expression of the archive, offering unparalleled access to the breadth of Harris’s body of work with never-before-seen color photographs and moving images alongside iconic black-and-white photographs, film negatives, and recorded oral histories.

A painting depicts a landscape scene. Two trees in the foreground frame a mountain peak in the background and the sky is bright with the colors of sunset.
Ongoing

This gallery brings together artworks that reflect on the artists’ place in time and history. Artists here represent land as powerful, sacred, bountiful, and beautiful, all the while addressing human histories of violence and dispossession of its Indigenous stewards and forced agricultural labor.