Art Institute of Chicago

The Art Institute’s encyclopedic collection–the third largest collection of art in the country–consists of approximately 300,000 works of art in 11 curatorial departments. Areas of particularly strong holdings are Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings; American art; Japanese prints; and contemporary art. Among the best known works are: Gustave Caillebotte’s Paris Street; Rainy Day; Georges Seurat’s A Sunday on the Isle of La Grande Jatte–1884; Grant Wood’s American Gothic; Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks; and Pablo Picasso’s The Old Guitarist. The Art Institute also houses an architecture and design collection of more than 140,000 fragments, models, renderings, and related materials; one of the leading museum libraries in the country, the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries; one of the largest and most prominent collections of paperweights; and the Thorne Miniature Rooms, 68 truly unique small-scale recreations of European, American, and Asian domestic interiors.

History

Established in 1879.

The Art Institute of Chicago, founded in 1879 as both a museum and school, first stood on the southwest corner of State and Monroe Streets. It opened on its present site at Michigan Avenue and Adams Street in 1893. Built on rubble from the 1871 Chicago fire, the museum housed a collection of plaster casts and had a visionary purpose: to acquire and exhibit art of all kinds and to conduct programs of education. The collection now encompasses more than 5,000 years of human expression from cultures around the world, and the school’s graduate program is continually ranked as one of the best in the country.