Art Institute of Chicago - Chicago, IL
Posted by: 
Metro2
N 41° 52.778 W 087° 37.445
16T E 448217 N 4636600
This Museum was established in 1879 and has been at this location since 1893.
Waymark Code: WMTW4D
Location: Illinois, United States
Date Posted: 01/12/2017
Views: 8
Wikipedia (
visit link) informs us:
"The Art Institute of Chicago, founded in 1879 and located in Chicago's Grant Park, is one of the oldest and largest art museums in the United States. Recognized for its curatorial efforts and popularity among visitors, the museum hosts approximately 1.5 million guests annually.[1] Its collection—stewarded by 11 curatorial departments—is encyclopedic, and includes iconic works such as Georges Seurat's A Sunday on La Grande Jatte — 1884, Pablo Picasso's The Old Guitarist, Edward Hopper's Nighthawks, and Grant Wood's American Gothic. Its permanent collection of nearly 300,000 works of art is augmented by more than 30 special exhibitions mounted yearly that illuminate aspects of the collection and present cutting-edge curatorial and scientific research.
As a research institution, the Art Institute also has a conservation and conservation science department, five conservation laboratories, and one of the largest art history and architecture libraries in the country—the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries.
The growth of the collection has warranted multiple expansions of the museum's original 1893 building, which was constructed for the World's Columbian Exposition of the same year. The most recent expansion, the Modern Wing designed by Renzo Piano, opened in 2009 and increased the museum's footprint to nearly one million square feet, making it the second-largest art museum in the United States, after the Metropolitan Museum of Art.[2] The Art Institute is connected to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, a leading art school, making it one of the few remaining unified arts institutions in the United States."