Its collection, stewarded by 11 curatorial departments, includes works such as Georges Seurat's A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, Pablo Picasso's The Old Guitarist, Edward Hopper's Nighthawks, and Grant Wood's American Gothic.

The Modern Wing, designed by Renzo Piano, is the most recent expansion, and when it opened in 2009 it increased the museum's footprint to nearly one million square feet.

In 1866, a group of 35 artists founded the Chicago Academy of Design in a studio on Dearborn Street, with the intent to run a free school with its own art gallery.

Members tried to rescue the ailing institution by making deals with local businessmen, before some finally abandoned it in 1879 to found a new organization, named the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts.

The existing commercial building on that property was used for the organization's headquarters, and a new addition was constructed behind it to provide gallery space and to house the school's facilities.

[4]: 19  By January 1885 the trustees recognized the need to provide additional space for the organization's growing collection, and to this end purchased the vacant lot directly south on Michigan Avenue.

Between 1959 and 1970, the institute was a key site in the battle to gain art and documentary photography a place in galleries, under curator Hugh Edwards and his assistants.

[8] The institute began construction of "The Modern Wing", an addition situated on the southwest corner of Columbus and Monroe in the early 21st century.

[11] Collectors Stefan Edlis and Gael Neeson donated a "collection [that] is among the world's greatest groups of postwar Pop art ever assembled".

[12] The donation includes works by Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Cy Twombly, Jeff Koons, Charles Ray, Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman, Roy Lichtenstein and Gerhard Richter.

From pottery to textiles, the collection brings together a wide array of objects that seek to illustrate the thematic and aesthetic focuses of art spanning the Americas.

The collection covers landscape architecture, structural engineering, and industrial design, including the works of Frank Lloyd Wright, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Le Corbusier.

[32] The Art Institute's Asian collection spans nearly 5,000 years, including significant works and objects from China, Korea, Japan, India, Southeast Asia, and the Near and Middle East.

The pointillist masterpiece, which also inspired a musical and was featured in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Georges Seurat's Sunday Afternoon on La Grande Jatte—1884, is prominently displayed.

[38] The museum's collection of modern and contemporary art was significantly augmented when collectors Stefan Edlis and Gael Neeson gifted 40 plus master works to the department in 2015.

The collection contains a strong group of the works of Albrecht Dürer, Rembrandt van Rijn, Francisco Goya, and James McNeill Whistler.

From English needlework to Japanese garments to American quilts, the collection presents a diverse group of objects, including contemporary works and fiber art.

Designed by Louis Sullivan in 1894, the Exchange was demolished in 1972, but salvaged portions of the original trading room were brought to the Art Institute and reconstructed.

In September 2024, the museum announced a gift of $75 million for a new gallery building or wing named for benefactors Aaron I. Fleischman and Lin Lougheed.

[47] The Modern Wing is home to the museum's collection of early 20th-century European art, including Pablo Picasso's The Old Guitarist, Henri Matisse's Bathers by a River, and René Magritte's Time Transfixed.

The Lindy and Edwin Bergman Collection of Surrealist art includes the largest public display of Joseph Cornell's works (37 boxes and collages).

[48] The Wing also houses contemporary art from after 1960; new photography, video media, architecture and design galleries including original renderings by Frank Lloyd Wright, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Bruce Goff; temporary exhibition space; shops and classrooms; and a cafe.

[56] In 1990, the Art Institute of Chicago sold 11 works at auction, including paintings by Claude Monet, Pablo Picasso, Amedeo Modigliani, Maurice Utrillo and Edgar Degas, to raise the $12 million purchase price of a bronze sculpture, Golden Bird, by Constantin Brâncuși.

[59][60] In 2002, the Art Institute of Chicago filed suit alleging fraud by a small Dallas firm called Integral Investment Management, along with related parties.

[61] In 2010, the year after the opening of its massive Modern Wing, the Art Institute of Chicago sued the engineering firm Ove Arup for $10 million over what it said were flaws in the concrete floors and air-circulation systems.

The Chicago Tribune editorial page criticized the Institute's letter announcing the change and the move to a new model, arguing that "[o]nce you cut through the blather, the letter basically said the museum had looked critically at its corps of docents, a group dominated by mostly (but not entirely) white, retired women with some time to spare, and found them wanting as a demographic.

"[64] The Chair of the Institute's Board of Trustees, Robert M. Levy, responded in a Tribune op-ed supporting the change, and described the Tribune's editorial as having "numerous inaccuracies and mischaracterizations", noted that the docent program had already been largely on pause for the past 15 months due to the COVID pandemic, and argued that the decision was not about anyone's identity, it was in keeping with changing modern museum practices around the world.

[67] In 1996, heirs to Jewish art collectors Louise and Friedrich Gutmann, who died in Nazi concentration camps, sued museum trustee Daniel Searle for the return of the Edgar Degas painting, Landscape with Smokestacks.

[77] In 2023, the Manhattan District Attorney's Office moved to seize Egon Schiele paintings from several museums on the grounds that they had been looted by the Nazis from Fritz Grünbaum, who was killed in the Holocaust.

[80][81] In February 2024, the Manhattan District Attorney filed a motion accusing the Art Institute of "blatantly ignoring evidence of an elaborate fraud undertaken to conceal that the artwork had been looted".