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Join in a civic celebration with this tour featuring works by Chicago artists as well as works intrinsically linked to our city.

This past year, a tremendous variety of new objects joined the Art Institute’s holdings, each with its own unique story. Here’s a look at some of the notable works acquired in 2022 that enable us to share a more expansive history of art.

Chicago has long been a city that fosters and inspires artists, from students who are just starting their careers to acclaimed painters and sculptors. And the present day is no exception—the contemporary artists who call Chicago home make the city a vibrant community that welcomes creativity and big ideas. This tour, featuring a rotating selection of works created since 1990, showcases just a few of the many contemporary Chicago artists whose works are in the museum’s collection.

A constellation of exhibitions and events at the Art Institute and across the city that explore ideas around freedom, solidarity, and place from artists throughout Africa and the African diaspora.

Chicago is the home of progressive architecture and innovative design.

Responding to disproportionate racial and gender representation within Chicago’s modern and contemporary art scene in the 20th century, women seized the gap by forging their own spaces throughout the city. Learn about the history of placemaking in Chicago art spaces through selections from the Research Center’s Libraries and Archives. 

In celebration of our longtime partner the Chicago Public Library and their 150 years of extraordinary service, we had eight museum staff members highlight artworks in the collection that tell unique stories about the people, culture, and artists of our city. We invite you to join this self-guided tour and experience these story-filled works in the museum—maybe it’s an occasion to create your own Chicago stories. 

Inspired by elements of nature and the city, Art Institute of Chicago and Chicago Public Library staff engaged in a dialogue to find connections between six works of art and literature.

Cities—centers of human activity, growth, and creativity—have long incited imaginative responses from artists across time and place.

The Art Institute acquired its first work by a black artist—Henry Ossawa Tanner’s The Two Disciples at the Tomb—in 1906, the same year it was made.

Asian, Asian American, and Pacific Islander American (A/AAPI) artists continue to push the contemporary art landscape across a variety of media—architecture, design, installation art, painting, photography, printmaking, sculpture, and textiles. 

Let your imagination take over on this journey through the Thorne Rooms—miniature and, as generations of Art Institute visitors have found, wonderfully transporting.

The Language of Beauty in African Art includes over 250 objects from the continent across millennia—but how have contemporary artists in particular responded to those objects and traditions?

The Arts and Crafts movement originated in mid-19th-century England and gained momentum in Europe and the United States as a solution to the perceived ills of industrialization, mechanized production, and urbanization.

The Art Institute boasts an outstanding collection of American Art—fitting for a classic American city. Find some of the icons below.

Explore the ways LGBTQ+ artists have expressed gender, sexuality, and identity in the vast world of queer culture.

The museum’s galleries are continually changing as newly acquired works and loaned objects join our spaces and expand the perspectives and stories that we share.

Have some of our most popular works resonated with you? Would you like to explore further? If so, our curators are happy to suggest some lesser known works they think you might like.

Throughout his career Picasso was a great student of art, borrowing liberally the forms and ideas he admired in works from various cultures and periods.

The ancient Mediterranean, and Greece in particular, was home to a great variety of artistic communities. Over 3,000 years ago, these makers used natural resources like stone, clay, and metals to create new forms, styles, and techniques that remain iconic to this day. Explore a few highlights from the Art Institute’s collection of ancient Greek art here.