The Art Institute’s wide-ranging collection is a testament to thousands of years of human creativity and artistic ...

This work, set at a circus, captures the tense moment in which a female trick rider prepares to stand up on her horse and leap through a paper hoop held by a clown. The horse gathers speed, spurred on ...

At first glance, Self-Portrait of My Sister appears to be a relatively straightforward representation of a young woman. It was painted by the Chicago Surrealist Gertrude Abercrombie but seems to lack ...

Rufino met a sympathetic soul in the artist and fellow Escuela Nacional student María Izquierdo.

The Art Institute of Chicago shares its singular collections with our city and the world. We collect, care for, and interpret works of art across time, cultures, geographies, and identities, centering ...

Following the example of the revolutionary early seventeenth-century artist Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Bartolomeo Manfredi chose to depict ordinary individuals in his scenes from the Bible and ...

The Art Institute does not offer appraisals of artworks, books, maps, or other library materials. The libraries can, however, help you devise search strategies for finding information about particular ...

Benny Andrews attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago from 1954 to 1958 on the G.I. Bill. Upon graduating, he moved to New York, where he began agitating for black artists to be ...

Bruce Nauman’s wildly influential, relentlessly imitated work explores the poetics of confusion, anxiety, boredom, entrapment, and failure. One of the artist’s most spectacular achievements to date, ...

Elihu Vedder depicted the three Fates of Greek mythology working the thread of life: Clotho spins the thread, Lachesis fixes its length, and Atropos cuts it at the appointed time of death. Their ...

Untitled (Purple, White, and Red) follows the characteristic format of Mark Rothko’s mature work, in which stacked rectangles of color appear to float within the boundaries of the canvas. By directly ...