Visit the Art Institute of Chicago

Taking one of the very first places on the list of Tourist Attractions in Chicago, a top-tier museum containing millions of works of art is the Art Institute of Chicago. The extensive collection, which spans thousands of years, contains works in a wide range of media, including sculpture, decorative arts, textiles, prints, photography, painting, and architectural designs, among others.

The Institute is renowned for its collection of impressionist and post-Impressionist paintings, which includes a number of works by Claude Monet as well as Georges Seurat's 1884 A Sunday Afternoon on La Grande Jatte and Renoir's 1879 Acrobats at the Cirque Fernando.

The main structure was constructed for the World's Columbian Exposition in 1893 and was designed in the beaux-arts style by Shepley, Rutan, and Coolidge. Over time, additional structures were erected, and the complex now has 400,000 square feet of space. More than 30 temporary exhibits are staged yearly to complement the museum's roughly 300,000-piece permanent collection and to showcase cutting-edge curatorial and academic research.

The Ryerson and Burnham Libraries, one of the biggest art history and architectural libraries in the nation, are part of the Art Institute's conservation and conservation science department, which is also home to five conservation laboratories.

Address: 111 South Michigan Avenue, Chicago, Illinois

Official site: http://www.artic.edu/