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Two young women sit painting in front of Alexander Calder's Flying Dragon, a bright-red metal sculpture located in a blooming garden.

Summer 2023
The Top 10 Things to Do

Here’s your guide to just some of our many offerings this summer, including member-only exclusives, can’t-miss exhibitions, and more.

Photograph shows people in an art gallery observing Pablo Picasso's large painting "Mother and Child." On a bench before the painting, a woman and an adolescent girl sit together, the girl's head resting on the woman's shoulder. A young boy gazes up at the painting, his back to us.

Top 10
Ways to Connect This Winter

Join us for holiday favorites, creative exploration, curatorial insights, and much more.

A color photograph of Stevie Wonder shows him sitting singing and playing keyboards on an outdoor stage. The perspective is from the stage looking out on a sea of people in the audience.

Inside the Exhibition
In the Key of Soul: The Photographs of Kwame Brathwaite

Best known as the photographer of the “Black is Beautiful” movement, Brathwaite created images that were inspired by jazz and popular music of the 1960s and 1970s.

The Artistic Process
“Though it be a difficult task”: Creating a Printed Imitation of a Rembrandt Drawing

A checkerboard drawing in black on cream paper of squares that get thinner at middle-right, creating the illusion of depth.

Inside the Exhibition
“An Eye at the End of My Pencil”: Bridget Riley’s Drawings

Through drawing—and some surprising artistic influences—Riley established a foundation for her investigation of abstraction and nourished her creative experimentation.

A gleaming dark brown sculpture of a female form seen in 3/4 view, from the knees up. Her shoulders press against the wall, while her neck inclines her head forward at an angle. Her arms hang at her side with her hands pressed on top of her thighs. While her prominent breasts are fully delineated, the rest of her figure is obscured by a full-length abstracted dress.

New Acquisition
Simone Leigh’s Sharifa

Discover the ideas and projects that blossomed into this powerful sculpture by the Chicago-born artist and why the Art Institute makes a particularly resonant home for it.

Softly painted image of a woman with light skin and wide, knowing brown eyes. She wears a light-colored hat and a blue dress, a hazy blue sky behind her.

Inside the Exhibition
The Artistic Homes of Paula Modersohn-Becker

Determined to reach her full potential, she moved between city and countryside in pursuit of artistic inspiration.

An iPad painting of a basket of flowers on a red checkered picnic blanket. The angled aerial view shows the dark dirt in the basket surrounding the yellowed flowering plant.

Inside the Exhibition
10 Things to Know about David Hockney’s The Arrival of Spring, Normandy, 2020

Take a closer look at the making of the artist’s recent series of iPad paintings—plus discover his past works, inspirations, and Chicago connections.

A light-skinned woman with wavy brown hair, prominent gold dangling earrings, and a blue suit jacket—Nora Gainer—sits before Seurat's "La Grande Jatte."

Meet the Staff
Nora Gainer, Executive Director, Civic Relations and Partnerships

A world traveler, Nora has always been most at home in Chicago, where she works to deepen ties between the city and the museum.

A Black family of four rests together in bed against a seafoam-green wall while reading a newspaper. They are all under seafoam-green and teal blankets except for the baby, who is nestled in a white bassinet adjacent to the mother, whose arm reaches out from behind the paper to tend to the child. Between the mother and father, who are both obscured by the papers, a young boy turns his head to look at the paper his father is reading.

Inside the Exhibition
In the Room with David Goldblatt

One family’s morning in bed offers a window into South African life under apartheid—and a photographer’s efforts to reckon with its legacies.

Staff Picks
Eyes in Art

Read what happens when five staff members lock eyes with works of art.

From the Curator
Lilly Martin Spencer: Hearth, Home, and National Fame

Ambitious and savvy, the 19th-century artist Lilly Martin Spencer forged an artistic career against all odds.

From the Archives
Artists in the Galleries

SoapN Bubble Set features the old fashioned pipes that would have been used for blowing bubbles and other playful objects

From the Collection
Creative Filing as Joyous Creation: The Works of Joseph Cornell

Through his unique alchemy, the self-taught designer transformed everyday materials into poetry.

Curatorial Connections
Stilled Life: The Hands and Face of Abraham Lincoln by Leonard Volk

Curator Annelise K. Madsen ponders how the life casts of Abraham Lincoln’s face and hands—objects with an uncanny presence—offer an opportunity to rethink and reimagine our collective past.

Black-and-white photograph of an open paved roadway seen through a car windshield, low vegetation on either side and an overpass in the distance.

Inside the Exhibition
The Road to DRIVES

Traveling South Africa’s N1 highway in the ’90s, artist Jo Ractliffe began a photographic journey that would lead to an exhibition in Chicago.

On a turquoise-blue background, the image of a white and black table-like shape, rendered in three dimensions with various intersecting two-dimensional shapes, repeats regularly in various sizes, rotated to various different angles.

Inside the Exhibition
Dan Friedman’s Radical Transformation

Inspired by modernist ideals and the East Village art scene, he turned away from corporate branding to embrace a fun-loving and deeply progressive spirit of design.

Painting of a crowd of figures carrying candles and wearing white bonnets through which a woman is led on horseback holding a small, bundled child. The woman's dark-blue dress contrasts against a pale-pink sky. The figures stand so closely together that their hats form a sea of white. Many bonnets are illuminated like lanterns.

One Theme, Multiple Voices
First Encounters with Works of Art

Six staff members reflect upon the impact and power of their first impressions of an artwork.

Inside the Exhibition
The Image Reappears: Discovering the Origins of a Puzzling Dalí

Learn how detective work by curators and conservators uncovered the lost history of a Dalí painting in our collection.

Perspectives
O’Keeffe’s Shells and Bones

Curator Kevin Salatino takes a look at how O’Keeffe joined her two worlds, east and west, desert and ocean, reconciling opposites.

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