The Renaissance Society, founded in 1915, is a leading independent contemporary art museum located on the campus of the University of Chicago, with a focus on the commissioning and production of new works by international artists.

The kunsthalle-style institution typically presents four exhibitions each year, along with concerts, performances, screenings, readings, and lectures—all of which are free and open to the public.

The Renaissance Society was founded in the wake of the Armory Show of 1913 at the Art Institute, which had travelled to Chicago after its contentious time in New York.

Then called the International Exhibition of Modern Art, the show was met with outrage and incomprehension in New York, leading to a similarly fervent uproar when it traveled to Chicago.

Member and secretary of the University of Chicago Board of Trustees, James Spencer Dickerson, felt it would be a nice to have particular portrait of poet Robert Browning in Harper Library, but there was no fund for such an acquisition.

The original tenets included a sense of morality to "uplift humanity, a prescription that honored the art of the past, particularly that of the Renaissance, as well as the rigid aesthetic dictates of academic realism.

In the first of a five annual exhibitions of modern French paintings, Gale included pieces by Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and Paul Gauguin, who were originally maligned by the Armory Show.

In the 1930–31 season, the Club brought Fernand Léger to Chicago to screen his film Le Ballet Mecanique and subsequently lent it to the Society.

In the last years of Schütze’s leadership, curtailed by her failing health, the Society introduced Chicago’s audience to avant-garde art that was seldom or never before seen before in the United States.

However, it was James Johnson Sweeney who presented the Society’s boldest curatorial statements in his exhibition A Selection of Works by Twentieth-Century Artists.

Non-representational works by seminal abstractionists—Jean Arp, Constantin Brâncuși, Alexander Calder, Juan Gris, Jean Hélion, Fernand Léger, Joan Miró, Piet Mondrian, and Pablo Picasso—were included in the comprehensive catalog of which much material had never before been exhibited in the country.

[5] Though Sweeney had met with Léger in Paris the summer prior and explained that Schütze had decided to hold a show for him, the exhibition date had not been set.

A decade later, another great Bauhaus figure, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who was then teaching at the Illinois Institute of Technology, was shown in an architecture exhibition at the Society.

From 1941 to 1962, artist Francis Strain Beisel was director of the Renaissance Society, which became the "preeminent site for exhibitions in the Chicago area in the 1940s and 1950s.

The Society even ignored Pollock and de Kooning (who were already recognized as innovators) in its 1955 Eleven Pioneers of the Twentieth Century, opting instead to include William Glackens, Marsden Hartley, Robert Henri, John Sloan, and Maurice Prendergast.

Beginning with its exhibition "Joseph Kosuth" in early 1976, the Society engaged in a discussion with contemporary art that rejected "traditional pictorial and sculptural definitions.

Some significant artists who showed at the Renaissance Society in the 1990s include Felix Gonzalez-Torres (1994), Kara Walker (1997), Kerry James Marshall (1998), and Raymond Pettibon (1998).

After 40 years as Executive Director and Chief Curator of the Renaissance Society, Ghez ended her tenure in 2013 her final show William Pope.L: Forlesen.

Matthias Poledna removed the overhead truss grid that had defined the gallery space, giving future artists more spatial freedom than in previous decades.

"[9] Walker won the Ordway Prize in 2010, in recognition of his innovative curatorial work and his wide-ranging thinking and writing about contemporary art.