Gallery Tour

Today we went into the galleries of the Art Institute of Chicago (AIC) to check out the collection. The Museum houses about 5,000 years of art and has around 80,000 works of art! Needless to say, we couldn’t see it all in one day.

Good thing we have the chance to go into the galleries every week!

We spent a large part of our tour in the Modern Wing, where the museum’s collection of modern European painting and sculpture, contemporary art, architecture and design, and photography are located. Here, we had a chance to explore the other component of our theme: Collage.

Collage as an artist’s technique dates back to the 1900’s, when Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque began to incorporate newspaper clippings and printed papers into their paintings. The Art Institute has some great examples of these early works, and we made sure to head to the third floor of the Modern Wing to check them out!

Collage has since expanded to include photographs, fabric, wood, found objects and other ephemera that are arranged and stuck down onto a supporting surface. As we made our way around the Modern Wing, we saw how artists played with materials, forms, colors and composition to create their collage works.

The possibilities of collage are so expansive and our tour through the museum gave us a great base from which to begin generating our own ideas. It also sparked an interesting conversation about what art is vs. what art is not. We found that as artworks began to include more and more objects from our everyday lives, our opinions became more and more varied as to whether or not a piece “belonged” in the Art Institute or could be considered as “good” art.

We finished the tour in the “New Contemporary” exhibition space and began to think about our first major project of the semester: "Pop-Up" art interventions in the galleries.