Photographer Charles “Teenie” Harris is known as the top chronicler of Black life and culture in Pittsburgh for most of the 20 th century. The Harris archive at the Carnegie Museum of Art includes more than 75,000 of his images. But the full extent of what he documented is still being revealed.
The latest step in that exploration comes Saturday when the Carnegie opens its new gallery exploring Harris’ vast archive . While the museum first devoted permanent space to the archive in 2020 , the new gallery is larger and more accessibly located than any previous incarnation. It features images — both still and moving, color and black-and-white — never before exhibited publicly, as well as selections from the museum’s trove of oral histories recalling the people, places and events Harris captured.
“The most exciting part is this is the whole breadth of the catalog,” said Charlene Foggie-Barnett, the museum’s community archivist for the Harris collection. “This is not just a portion of it. This is the first time we’ve had everything Teenie included in the archive in one space.
” The gallery is located on the museum’s second floor. Spacious and outfitted with tables, books and comfortable seating, it displays framed prints of Harris photographs as well as three video projections playing continuous loops mixing his still photos with film clips. Binders on the tables contain themed selections of Harris photos, 1,000 in all.
The oral histories are accessible via.