The Carnegie Museums in Pittsburgh, PA, consist of four museums—a natural history museum, an art museum, a science center, and The Warhol. Read on for more about these great museums in Pittsburgh.
Industrialist Andrew Carnegie left a profound mark on Pittsburgh, where he made his fortune in steel. He funded universities, built libraries, and established an institution designed to enrich people’s lives through museums.
Originally, the Carnegie Museums consisted of a natural history and an art museum. It has grown to include a science center and the largest single-artist museum in North America, The Warhol.
Carnegie Museum of Natural History
The Carnegie Museum of Natural History is an active research center with over 20 million specimens, objects, and artifacts. It’s known for its dinosaur collection, one of the largest collections in the United States.
But, it isn’t just the sheer number of dinosaurs on display that make this museum so popular with enthusiasts of the Jurassic period. Seventy-five percent of the exhibits are genuine dinosaur bones, not the casts displayed in most other museums.
You can also watch specialists remove fossils from their surrounding rock, clean them, and repair them through a large glass window into the PaeloLab between the dinosaurs and the Hillman Hall of Minerals and Gems.
Minerals and gems don’t usually impress me, but this collection, the largest in the nation, did. You’ll see more than 1,300 minerals and gems on display from all over the world, including gold from California, copper from Arizona, topaz from Russia and silver from the Czech Republic.
The Walton Hall of Ancient Egypt was one of my favorite parts of the museum. Sure, there were actual mummies on display and even a reproduction of a tomb from a workman’s village, but the 4,000-year-old funerary boat wowed me. Excavated near Cairo, it is one of only six such craft ever discovered.
I also liked ambling past the taxidermy dioramas in the Hall of North American Wildlife and the Hall of African Wildlife. Don’t miss the display of the camel-riding Bedouin, knife in hand, fighting off an attacking lion. It’s pretty intense.
Still more taxidermy can be found in the Hall of Birds, and more fossils throughout. Watch for the saber-toothed cat and Columbian mammoth (skeletons found in the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles), warthog-like creature Dinohyus, and the massive Irish elk.
Carnegie Museum of Art
Located in the same building as the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, the Carnegie Museum of Art bills itself as the “first museum of contemporary art in the United States” and prides itself on collecting the “Old Masters of tomorrow.”
The collection, which ranges from paintings and sculptures to decorative arts and video, isn’t necessarily what most people today consider contemporary. When Carnegie opened his museum in 1895, he didn’t have much art. To bolster his collection, he began hosting the Carnegie International, a contemporary art exposition still held every few years. At the exposition, he would purchase pieces he liked.
Art created in 1895, however, isn’t necessarily what we’d consider contemporary today. Think Winslow Homer’s The Wreck, one of Carnegie’s purchases through the exposition.
Carnegie’s collection grew quickly through acquisitions from the exposition and elsewhere. In 1907, he added the Hall of Sculpture and the Hall of Architecture to the museum. Inspired by the Parthenon, the Hall of Sculpture displays reproductions of Egyptian, Near Eastern, Greek, and Roman sculptures.
The Hall of Architecture replicates the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, one of the Seven Wonders of the World, and contains 144 architectural casts and 69 plaster reproductions of sculpture, making it one of the largest plaster cast collections in the world. My favorite pieces were the reproductions of the Florence Baptistery doors and the façade of St.-Gilles-du-Gard.
Other must-see exhibits include the work of African-American photographer Charles “Teenie” Harris, the chair collection in the Bruce Galleries, and the Heinz Center of Architecture.
Since the Carnegie Museum of Natural History and the Carnegie Museum of Art are in the same building, admission to one gets you into the other. Plan to spend four hours (two hours in each museum, depending on your interests) when you go.
The Andy Warhol Museum
I didn’t know much about Andy Warhol, the flamboyant artist, director, and pop culture icon, before I visited the Andy Warhol Museum. To be honest, I probably would have skipped the museum if I had been on my own, but I’m so glad I didn’t.
The largest single-artist museum in North America tells the story of Warhol, starting with his early years and following through the 60s, 70s, and 80s. On each floor of the museum, you’ll find a timeline detailing the events of his life during each period.
Works on display range from photographs and videos to commercial art and Warhol’s iconic Campbell’s Soup Cans. An entire section of the fifth floor is dedicated to the celebrity portraits of Jackie Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe, and others.
I spent a lot of time in the Silver Clouds installation, a room filled with what looked like silver, helium-filled pillows. (Something is mesmerizing about how these shiny pillows floated through the space.)
The museum also houses Warhol’s serial work Time Capsules, 60 containers Warhol filled with fan letters, telephone messages, dinner invitations, and other ephemera documenting his life. You can see some of the contents on display on the third floor.
Be sure to check out The Factory, located in the basement. There, you can experiment with Warhol’s art-making techniques, such as blotted-line drawing, acetate collage, and silkscreen printing. (You can even purchase a t-shirt or tote bag to create your own souvenir.)
Probably the most unique exhibit, though, is one that’s technically not at the museum. Figment is a 24-hour-a-day, seven-days-a-week live video feed of Warhol’s gravesite you can access through the museum’s website. Few people show up to pay their respects, but it’s oddly addictive.
Carnegie Science Center
Due to time constraints, I didn’t make it to the Carnegie Science Center, the fourth of Carnegie’s museums in Pittsburgh.
But, my hosts from Visit Pittsburgh told me it has exhibits on the body, water, and the world’s largest permanent robotics experience, Roboworld. There’s also an indoor ropes challenge course with nets, a rope bridge, and a zipline. A miniature railroad and village dating back to 1919 depicts life in the area from the 1880s to the 1930s. (Look for Fallingwater, Punxsutawney Phil, and the famous Pittsburgh incline in the display.)
Buhl Planetarium and the USS Requin, a decommissioned submarine you can tour, are also part of the Carnegie Science Center.
Even at the three museums I visited, I felt like there was so much more to see, so all four museums will be on my itinerary the next time I visit.
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