111 South Michigan Avenue
(312) 443-3600
Admission: $8 adults; $5 students, children, &
seniors. Tuesdays are free to all.
www.artic.edu
What's
New at the Art Institute of Chicago
Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks. Grant Wood’s American
Gothic. George Seurat’s A Sunday on the Island of La
Grand Jatte, 1884. They’re all here.
The Art Institute of Chicago is home to over 300,000 objects
of fine art and related cultural artifacts, but it’s arguably
most famous for its world-class collection of Impressionist
paintings. Monet, Degas, Renoir, Morisot and their colleagues
are represented in galleries that provide contexts for their
time, their predecessors, and the development of the traditions
they engendered. Less well-known but fully as impressive are the
museum’s holdings in European decorative arts, Chinese
antiquities, its Department of Prints and Drawings, and a
Photography collection that continues to be enriched by timely
gifts and sensitive acquisitions. The American wing displays a
wealth of important new additions to its collection of
paintings, sculpture, and decorative arts of the eighteenth and
nineteenth century. Modern art is represented in an encyclopedic
diversity of styles and schools, including galleries of
Contemporary art dating from 1980 to the present. Smaller, but
significant collections of African, South and Central American,
Amerindian, and Classical art join the Architecture and Textiles
Departments in this incredible showcase for the world’s great
artistic traditions.
Since it opened its doors on Michigan Avenue in 1893, the
museum has provided Chicagoans and their visitors with an
old-fashioned temple of learning that also has a sassy, cheerful
side. In the Kraft Educational Center, kids can get their hands
on special interactive features that illuminate the art works on
display. Saturday finds a legion of happy campers engaged in the
construction of masks, crowns, cities, or maps, using papier-mâché,
watercolor, or collage under the direction of an
artist-instructor. On Tuesdays in the summer, jazz music floats
up from McKinlock Court, where a full bar and restaurant menu
contribute to appreciation of the live entertainment. Upstairs
in the galleries, visitors peer intently at the exquisite
collection of Japanese woodblock prints, or the Harding
collection of arms and armor, with its truly awesome array of
pikestaffs, swords, armor, and finely crafted antique firearms.
Downstairs, miniature rooms of period furniture enchant children
and adults alike.
Its labyrinthine floor plan may be hard to navigate at first.
The museum developed organically, expanding as necessary to
accommodate an ever-growing and improving collection. Visitors
in wheelchairs may have to take a somewhat circuitous route, but
the museum is completely accessible.
Admission is free on Tuesdays, when the museum is open till
8. The doors are open other weekdays from 10:30 to 4:30, on
Saturday from 10 to 5 and Sunday from 12 to 5. The suggested
donation is $8.00 for adults, $5.00 for children. Tip: The
cafeteria food is expensive and mediocre, so you may prefer to
buy a picnic lunch at a nearby restaurant to eat in one of the
beautiful surrounding gardens.
Hours:
Monday 10:30am -
4:30pm
Tuesday 10:30am - 8pm
Wednesday 10:30am - 4:30pm
Thursday 10:30am - 4:30pm
Friday
10:30am - 4:30pm
Saturday 10am - 5pm
Sunday
12pm - 5pm
Admission:
"Suggested Donations"
Adult $8.00
Children $5.00
