Art Institute of Chicago
Vast art museum famed for Impressionist masterpieces, Seurat, Hopper and American art.
The Art Institute of Chicago was founded in 1879 as the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts, a museum and school, and took its present name in 1882. Its main building on Michigan Avenue, in Grant Park, was designed by the Boston firm Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge in the Beaux-Arts style and built for the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893, when it hosted the World's Congress Auxiliary. The museum moved in after the exposition, and the two bronze lions by Edward Kemeys have guarded the entrance since 1894.
The museum has expanded many times, with additions spanning the railway tracks east of the original building. The Modern Wing, designed by Renzo Piano and opened in 2009, added galleries for twentieth- and twenty-first-century art, a sculpture terrace and the Nichols Bridgeway pedestrian bridge linking the museum to Millennium Park. The complex also incorporates the reconstructed Trading Room of Louis Sullivan's Chicago Stock Exchange and is closely associated with the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
The permanent collection numbers around 300,000 works and spans some 5,000 years. It is especially known for its Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings, including Georges Seurat's A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, and for American works such as Grant Wood's American Gothic and Edward Hopper's Nighthawks. Other strengths include European painting, photography, architecture and design, Asian art, the Thorne Miniature Rooms and a large collection of prints and drawings, displayed alongside a changing programme of temporary exhibitions.
Highlights
- Beaux-Arts main building of 1893 with the bronze lions by Edward Kemeys
- Seurat's A Sunday on La Grande Jatte and a major Impressionist collection
- Grant Wood's American Gothic and Edward Hopper's Nighthawks
- Renzo Piano's Modern Wing and the Nichols Bridgeway to Millennium Park
- Thorne Miniature Rooms, 68 detailed scale models of interiors
