ChicagoArt Guide

The Art Institute of Chicago

At nearly 100,000 square metres, the Art Institute of Chicago is the largest museum in the city and the second-largest museum in the United States. Making good use of the space, the Institute is packed with artworks from the ancient through to the contemporary era. It offers curated presentations of local, national, and international artworks, complemented by a permanent collection that includes national treasures such as Grant Wood’s American Gothic (1930).

The Chicago Cultural Center

Another significant Chicago art institution, the Chicago Cultural Center neighbours the Art Institute of Chicago at its downtown location. An architectural gem topped by a magnificent 11.5-metre-wide Tiffany Dome, the Chicago Cultural Center hosts a range of quality exhibitions every year, as well as the Chicago Architecture Biennial every two years.

Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art

A short walk or bus ride north of the Art Institute and the Cultural Center will lead the art-minded individual right to the steps of the Museum of Contemporary Art. More experimental in approach than the Art Institute, the Museum of Contemporary Art is devoted to cutting-edge presentations in collaboration with some of the biggest names in the contemporary art world.

In 2020, the Museum of Contemporary Art presented Duro Olowu: Seeing Chicago, for which the titular Nigeria-born British designer assembled a vast number of objects from the city’s public and private art collections in order to reimagine the historical and contemporary relationship between artists and objects. Large-scale retrospectives of artists such as Virgil Abloh and Takashi Murakami are also a staple of the Museum’s programming.

Southside of Chicago

Many more contemporary art destinations are to be found on the South Side of Chicago, including the Stony Island Arts Bank. The building that now houses the Stony Island Arts Bank was originally a community bank that had closed and fallen into disrepair. Chicago artist Theaster Gates bought the building in 2015, restored it, and reopened it as a community centre, library, archive, and gallery focused on the history of the South Side.

Another important art destination on the South Side is the Renaissance Society. Located in the heart of the University of Chicago’s campus, the Renaissance Society is a 280-square-metre single-room gallery that offers experimental new presentations from important contemporary artists such as Jill Magid, William Pope.L, Dawoud Bey, and Liz Magor.

West Town

West Town, located in Chicago’s Near West Side, is also a hub of cultural institutions for the city. There, one can find the Chicago Artists Coalition (CAC). A non-profit gallery space and organisation supporting emerging generations of artists, the CAC has for nearly fifty years advocated for the rights of artists, spurring developments including the creation of the Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs.

The CAC is also responsible for making Chicago the first large city to legislate a Percent for Art Ordinance, which stipulates that a percentage of the cost of constructing or renovating municipal buildings must go towards commissioning new art for that building. The CAC is thus in part to thank for Chicago’s noteworthy public art collection, which includes Anish Kapoor‘s Cloud Gate (2004) in Millennium Park downtown, and Kerry James Marshall‘s Knowledge and Wonder (1995) at the Legler Branch of the Chicago Public Library in West Garfield Park.

West Town is also home to a cluster of Chicago art galleries, such as Kavi Gupta Gallery, Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Monique Meloche Gallery, and Corbett vs. Dempsey. It is here you can explore a range of paintings, sculptures and other mediums to buy.

Expo Chicago and Chicago galleries

The EXPO Chicago art fair, held at the scenic Navy Pier overlooking Lake Michigan, brings more galleries to town each year for a week of innovative presentations and programming.

Key to Chicago’s art scene is its massive number of artist-run initiatives, dispersed throughout the city and into its neighbouring suburbs. These initiatives include Compound Yellow—a gallery, workshop, and home hosted across several canary-yellow buildings in Oak Park, an area best known for its plethora of Frank Lloyd Wright-designed buildings—and Comfort Station, an ex-trolley rest stop that Logan Square Preservation revitalised as a community art space.

Another artist-run gallery, Co-Prosperity is a Bridgeport hub of the Public Media Institute, which is an institution responsible for multiple periodicals throughout the city, a radio station, a consignment store, and a pandemic initiative that provides free chef-quality meals to the Bridgeport public daily. Other artist-run spaces in the city and surrounding areas include Adds Donna, Prairie, Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Roots & Culture, and Extase.

You can explore this guide further for Chicago exhibitions and Chicago Art Museums to visit.