Picture the most comprehensive single-artist museum in the world, dedicated to a man born Andrew Warhola in 1928 in a two-room apartment in Pittsburgh's Oakland neighborhood, the son of Carpatho-Rusyn immigrants from what is now Slovakia. His father worked in coal mines and construction. His mother Julia was a devout Byzantine Catholic who made elaborate paper-cut flowers she sold door to door.
Andy was a sickly child who spent months in bed with a neurological disorder, and his mother gave him his first camera and coloring books during that time. He attended Carnegie Tech — now Carnegie Mellon — where he studied pictorial design, then moved to New York in 1949 and transformed American art. The Campbell's soup cans, the Marilyn prints, the Factory, Interview magazine, the Velvet Underground: all of it grew from a Pittsburgh kid who never entirely shed his roots.
He returned to Carnegie Mellon to deliver a commencement address in 1978 and donated work to Pittsburgh institutions throughout his life. He died in 1987. The museum holds 900 paintings, 77 sculptures, and 4,000 photographs across seven floors of a former Nabisco warehouse.
Go inside. His Pittsburgh origins are the first thing you encounter.