Panevėžys City Art Gallery was established in 1990, subordinated to the City Municipality, its founder is the City Council.
The Art Gallery organises solo, group and single-art concept exhibitions of various genres. The works of Panevėžys, Aukštaitija, Lithuanian and foreign artists are exhibited here. The Gallery initiates new cultural projects and participates in joint Lithuanian and foreign professional art projects.
The Photography Gallery was founded in1992 and in 2010 it became a department of the Art Gallery. The Photography Gallery is engaged in the promotion of artistic photography, as well as creative, educational and publishing activities. In 2015, another section of the Art Gallery opened its doors to visitors - the Pavilion of the Panevėžys International Ceramics Symposium Exhibition.
Education is an important part of the Gallery's activities: presentations of exhibitions, work with visitors during exhibitions, educational excursions, lectures, discussions on cultural and artistic topics.
Educational creative programmes are regularly organised for children, schoolchildren and adults of all ages.
International theoretical conferences are also organised, with topics dictated by trends in the art world. The Gallery hosts chamber music concerts, performances, and interdisciplinary art events.
The Gallery is involved in publishing activities, producing art catalogues, brochures, posters, and informative publications. It also collects collections of fine art, photography, ceramics and glass art.
Since 1990 the Gallery has been organising the Panevėžys International Ceramics Symposium. These symposiums have become famous not only in Lithuania, but also worldwide. Panevėžys Art Gallery has a collection of more than 680 works of fireclay ceramics created by 186 artists from 37 countries. In addition to this unique collection, which is constantly being supplemented by new works, the gallery has more than 3,000 books, various publications and visual materials on ceramics from around the world. During the symposia, international theoretical conferences on ceramics are held, which, in addition to the participants, also invite theoreticians, thus enabling valuable theoretical generalizations to be made. These conferences bring people interested in ceramics from all over Lithuania, as well as the closing exhibition at the Art Gallery, where all the works created during the symposium can be seen.
Since 2005, the Panevėžys International Biennial of Photography "Man and the City" has been held. Photographs and video works created by the participants of this popular photography forum - well-known photographers - are a regular addition to the Gallery's collections of artistic photography.
Since 2018 the Gallery, together with Panevėžys art glass studio Glasremis, has been organising the International Symposium of Art Glass Glass Glass "GlassJazz".
From the establishment of the Art Gallery in the 1990s until August 2016, it was managed by Jolanta Lebednykienė. Since 2 November 2016, Egidijus Žukauskas has been the gallery's director.
In 2016, the global website Culture Trip recognized the gallery as one of the top ten galleries in the Baltic States:
The Gallery is a member of the Lithuanian Art Gallerists Association.
In 2017 the gallery became a member of the International Academy of Ceramics (IAC):
In 2021, the Gallery was recognised as the best in the category of museums, manors, castles and other visited objects in the study on the attractiveness of Lithuanian tourist destinations initiated by the National Agency for Tourism Promotion "Travel Lithuania".
The results of the survey highlighted, among other things, that the Panevėžys City Art Gallery is open at convenient times, information stands are available for visitors, staff is helpful in both Lithuanian and English, and there are creative educational programmes for children.
The Panevėžys City Art Gallery was ranked in the Top 25 of the 2022 survey on the evaluation of the infrastructure of Lithuanian tourist sites in the category of Lithuanian Museums, Mansions, Castles, and Other Visited Sites . The Art Gallery was also the top-ranked tourist attraction in Panevėžys.
In a study initiated by the tourism promotion agency "Keliauk Lietuvoje", a total of 506 museums, mansions, castles and other attractions in Lithuania were assessed. In Panevėžys, 41 tourist attractions were evaluated.
