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Art Institute Of Chicago

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The Art Institute of Chicago is an encyclopedic art museum that features a collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art in its permanent collection. Much can be found in its collection of American art, Old Masters, European and American decorative arts, Asian art, Islamic art, Ancient and Classical Egyptian art, modern and contemporary art, and architecture and industrial and graphic design. In total, the collection size numbers about 300,000 works and is visited about one-hundred and fifty million times each year. The Art Institute is the second-largest art museum in the United States after the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The museum was at first an Academy of Design studio founded by a group of 35 artists. When the …show more content…

These works range from early Japanese prints to modern American art. The museum is most famous for its collections of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, and American paintings. Many famous paintings are housed in the Institute such as The bedroom by Vincent van Gogh, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte by Georges Seurat, American Gothic by Grant Wood, Nighthawks by Grant Wood, The Old Guitarist by Pablo Picasso, and many more. Not only does the museum hold art pieces but other pieces of art from different mediums as well. On the lower levels are the Thorne Miniature rooms which showcase interior American, European, and Asian architectural and furniture styles from the Middle Ages to the 1930s. Several works are also designed with description plates written in braille for the visually impaired. There are also galleries that showcase ancient civilization pieces such as the Ancient Egyptian, Greek, and Roman galleries which hold the mummy and the mummy case of Paankhenamun. The Art Institute also offers an African American Art Collection that can be freely explored without the restraints that once accompanied it. Many pieces provide a close look of the progress made by African Americans as well as their continuing struggle. Pieces like Samuel J. miller’s Frederick Douglass daguerreotype is showcased in this collection. This collection also offers statues and figures such as The Boxer by Richmond Barthe. The Institute also has a department called the Publications Department of the Art Institute of Chicago focused primarily on publishing books and offers titles focused on the museum’s rich collection, history, and exhibitions. The books published by the Department are distributed nationally and internationally by the Yale University

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