Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois

What is Art Institute of Chicago?

This is a nonprofit art museum and art school in a grand building on the edge of Grant Park. Its permanent collection holds close to 300,000 works, looked after by 11 curatorial departments, and more than 30 temporary exhibitions rotate through every year.

The paintings most visitors come for include Seurat's La Grande Jatte, Picasso's The Old Guitarist, Hopper's late-night diner scene Nighthawks and Wood's American Gothic. Behind the galleries are conservation labs and the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries, a major research collection for art history and architecture.

History of Art Institute of Chicago

The main building went up for the world's fair Chicago hosted in 1893, the World's Columbian Exposition. As the collection kept growing, the museum added one wing after another. The largest and newest is the Modern Wing by architect Renzo Piano, which opened in 2009 and brought the museum close to one million square feet of space. The ground under the museum belongs to the city and is managed by the Chicago Park District.

Visiting Art Institute of Chicago: tips

Give it at least half a day; even a focused tour of the best-known paintings takes a couple of hours. The museum is listed as wheelchair accessible. Because Route 66 began in downtown Chicago just steps away, a morning here pairs well with the first miles of the drive. Two more museums are very close: the Pritzker Military Museum & Library about 0.1 mile away and the Museum of Contemporary Photography about 0.4 mile away.