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The Art Institute of Chicago was founded as both a museum and school for the fine arts in 1879, a critical era in the history of Chicago as civic energies were devoted to rebuilding the metropolis that had been destroyed by the Great Fire of 1871. The Art Institute found its permanent home in 1893, when it moved into a building constructed on what is recognized today as the traditional homelands of the Council of Three Fires—the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi peoples. Built jointly with the city of Chicago for the World’s Columbian Exposition at the intersection of Michigan Avenue and Adams Street, that building—its entry flanked by the two famous bronze lions—remains the “front door” of the museum even today.
In keeping with the academic origins of the institution, a research library was constructed in 1901; eight major expansions for gallery and administrative space have followed, with the latest being the Modern Wing, which opened in 2009. The permanent collection has grown from plaster casts to nearly 300,000 works of art in fields ranging from Chinese bronzes to contemporary design and from textiles to installation art. Together, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the museum of the Art Institute of Chicago are now internationally recognized as two of the leading fine-arts institutions in the United States.
*Information courtesy of https://www.artic.edu/about-us/mission-and-history
This major exhibition charts the career of the artist known simply as El Greco. Over 57 works from across the world trace not only the development of his distinctive style but also the astounding ambition that drove him to relentlessly pursue success.
*Information courtesy of https://www.artic.edu/exhibitions/2939/el-greco-ambition-and-defiance
In 1853, when John Beasley Greene first visited Egypt with his camera, archaeology and photography were still very new.
Over the course of his exceptionally brief career—he died at the age of 24—Greene made an extraordinary body of pictures that advanced both archaeology and photography and continues to offer insight into the central concerns that shaped the two fields.
*Information courtesy of https://www.artic.edu/exhibitions/9167/signs-and-wonders-the-photographs-of-john-beasley-greene
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