For most of its history, 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 there is much to glean from a linear history of art, there are so many other questions to ask of this collection.
In response to these questions, 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 and a reconsideration of over 100,000 artworks across all time periods, mediums, and disciplines. Museum staff is hard at work, bringing forward new interdisciplinary and creative ideas to reposition the collection as an even more relevant 21st-century resource.
In 2023, this reinstallation began with What Brings Us Here?, and in 2024 the work continued with the opening of a new gallery dedicated to the Pittsburgh-born photojournalist Charles “Teenie” Harris (1908–1998). Through 2027, additional galleries will periodically close and reopen with new installations, rarely exhibited artworks, and old favorites in new contexts, exploring important questions and inviting conversation through themes such as power, representation, technology, perception, media, the role of the museum, and our relationship to the land.
