Chicago - Art Institute of Chicago

Beginning in 1866 as the Chicago Academy of Design, one of the first art schools in the country, the Art Institute of Chicago is a world class museum with a collection of more than 300,000 artworks arranged within 10 curatorial departments. The diverse collection spans thousands of years and includes pieces from a variety of media including painting, prints, photography, sculpture, decorative arts, textiles, architectural drawings and more. The main building, designed by Shepley, Rutan, and Coolidge in beaux-arts style, was built for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition. Several other buildings have been added on over the years and today the complex measures 400,000 square feet. The Institute is probably best known for its collection of impressionist and post-Impressionist paintings including Georges Seurat's 1884 "A Sunday Afternoon on La Grand Jatte," Renoir's 1879 "Acrobats at the Circus Fernando" and 33 paintings by Claude Monet.

However there are opportunities to discover treasures in each of the major departments, which include:

African and Amerindian Art

American Art

Architecture

Asian Art

Ancient Art

European Art

Photography

European Decorative Arts and Sculpture

Prints and Drawing

Textiles

Arms and Armor

Modern and Contemporary Art

On the lower floor are the Thorne Miniature Rooms, a kind of gigantic dolls' house with 68 different rooms (representing every type of dwelling from a peasant's hut to a palace) reproduced on the scale of 1:12. Also within the complex are an art school, a Children's Museum, the Film Center and the renowned Goodman Theater.