Charles 'Teenie' Harris Archive Gallery

The Charles "Teenie" Harris Archive Gallery has been open at the Carnegie Museum of Art since November 2, 2024, and it's still running. You'll find it in Scaife Gallery 7, and it's built around the work of Charles "Teenie" Harris, a lifelong Pittsburgher who spent his career documenting the city's communities and Black life in midcentury America.

Harris was born and raised in the Hill District, and he kept his focus there. From 1936 to 1953, he owned and operated Harris Studio in the neighborhood, and for decades he worked as a photojournalist—first as a freelancer and then as a full-time staff member at the Pittsburgh Courier, which was one of the largest and most influential African American-owned newspapers in the country. He stayed on the Courier staff until 1975, and he didn't stop documenting the world around him after that, either. He kept shooting right up until his death on June 12, 1998, just a month shy of his 90th birthday, and along the way he moved into color film and moving images.

The gallery is a window into a massive archive. In 2001, the Carnegie Museum of Art bought the negatives and all rights from Harris's family and put together an advisory committee of family members, academics, and Pittsburgh community leaders. Since 2005, archivists have been gathering oral histories from people whose lives crossed with his. The archive now holds more than 75,000 negatives, nearly 5,000 feet of 16mm film, and more than 60 oral histories.

What you'll see in the gallery is a selection from that collection: photographs, projections, and archival materials from the museum. It's a good way to get a sense of the scale of what Harris left behind—a lifelong record of the city and the people who lived in it, kept in one place.