History. Andrew Carnegie first thought of setting up a museum in 1886 to that would preserve a "record of the progress and development of pictorial art in America." Dedicated on November 5, 1895, the art gallery was initially housed in the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh's Main Branch in Oakland.

With a collection of more than 30,000 works, areas of excellence include Old Master prints and drawings, nearly 3,000 Japanese prints, Impressionism, the expansive Teenie Harris Archive, our film and video archive, and contemporary art from the 1980s to the present, along with iconic works from other eras.