Art Institute of Chicago

Art Institute of Chicago, museum founded in Chicago, Illinois, in 1879 as the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts. The present name was adopted in 1882.

The collections of the Art Institute of Chicago are divided into 15 curatorial departments: African; American; Amerindian; Ancient; Architecture; Arms and Armor; Asian; Contemporary; European Decorative Art; European Painting and Sculpture; Modern; Photography; Prints and Drawings; Textiles; and the Thorne Miniature Rooms, which house examples of European interiors. More than 300,000 works of art are housed in the museum, including Chinese ceramics and sculpture; Japanese Buddhist art, woodblock prints, and screens; large-scale architectural drawings; collections of sculptures, prints, and drawings from 15th- through 19th- century Europe; collections of impressionist and postimpressionist paintings (see Impressionism; Postimpressionism); 20th-century artworks including the sculptures Golden Bird (1919), by Romanian-born sculptor Constantin Brancusi, and Flying Dragon (1975), by American sculptor Alexander Calder; and textiles ranging from ad100 to the present.

The Art Institute of Chicago also houses the Ryerson Library and the Burnham Library of Architecture. Together the libraries hold more than 150,000 volumes, 60,000 exhibition catalogues, 300,000 slides, and 1500 subscriptions to periodicals.

From 1887 to 1893 the Art Institute of Chicago was housed in its own building. In 1893 it was moved into a building that had been finished in time for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition. Buildings added to the 1893 structure include the Arthur Rubloff Building, completed in 1977, which added gallery space, an auditorium, cafeteria, restaurant, and member's lounge; and the reconstructed Trading Room from the Chicago Stock Exchange Building, designed by Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan. The three-story Daniel F. and Ada L. Rice Building, containing Regenstein Hall (1710 sq m/19,000 sq ft), one of the largest temporary exhibition spaces in an American museum, was added in 1988. Total gallery space in the museum measures 20,992 sq m (233,240 sq ft). A building program that will significantly increase this space was announced in 2005, with the new buildings due to open in 2009.

The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, founded concurrently with the museum, is an independent university offering studio training in many areas, including art and technology, ceramics, fashion design, filmmaking, interior architecture, painting and drawing, performance, photography, printmaking, sculpture, sound, and video. The school offers the bachelor and master of fine arts degrees as well as a master of arts in art therapy, a graduate certificate in art education, a post-baccalaureate studio certificate, a professional certificate in art education, and a master of arts in art history, theory, and criticism.