111 South Michigan Avenue 
(at Adams Street)

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