[1] Andrew Carnegie first thought of setting up a museum in 1886[2] 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.

[4] Under the directorship of Leon A. Arkus, the Sarah Mellon Scaife Gallery (125,000 square feet) was built as an addition to the existing Carnegie Institute.

Designed by architect Edward Larrabee Barnes, it first opened in 1974 and more than doubled the museum's exhibition space, also adding a children's studio, theater, café, offices, and bookstore.

Numerous significant works from the Internationals have been acquired for museum's permanent collection including Winslow Homer's The Wreck (1896) and James A. McNeill Whistler's Arrangement in Black: Portrait of Señor Pablo de Sarasate (1884).

[13] In 2023 the Manhattan District Attorney seized a drawing by Egon Schiele entitled Portrait of a Man within the framework of a criminal investigation concerning the Nazi-era looting of the collection of Fritz Grunbäum, who was murdered in the Holocaust.