[4] Founded in 1921, the school began as a profit-based independent school of art and illustration, producing a number of notable artists including watercolorist Frank Webb, animation producer and director Rick Schneider-Calabash, and the late science fiction illustrator Frank Kelly Freas.
[11] Whistleblowers within the company sued the institute due to practices at the online division, and were later joined by the United States Department of Justice.
[17] In 2017, Education Management Corporation reported that it had sold the Art Institute of Pittsburgh and the other existing Art Institutes to Dream Center Education Holdings (in turn a division of The Dream Center, a Los Angeles-based Pentecostal non-profit 501(c)(3) established in 1994).
[20] Dream Center would later blame EDMC for providing inaccurate revenue and cost projections at the time of the sale, resulting in a substantial operating deficit that forced the Art Institute into federal receivership in January 2019.
[21] After the collapse of a last-ditch effort to sell the school, the Art Institute of Pittsburgh shut its doors in March 2019 after being placed into federal receivership.
[3][22] At the time of its closure, Ai-Pittsburgh was facing removal of its accreditation by the Middle States Commission on Higher Education (MSCHE) due to concerns over the executive leadership.
During its growth phase, it relocated several times, expanding and broadening the curriculum, but later reduced offerings during its contraction period.