This special issue of Museum Studies explores the broad history and practice of art education at the Art Institute, charting the museum's past, present, and future vision of what museum education can be and do. Drawing from a rich trove of archival, oral, and photographic resources, authors offer a lively account of museum education as an evolving profession, an outlet for aesthetic and political programs, and a crucial element of the Art Institute's public mission from the moment of its founding in 1879. The project, sponsored by the Woman's Board of The Art Institute of Chicago to commemorate its fiftieth anniversary, also explores that group's signal commitment to education and volunteerism at the museum, which has ranged from creating suburban community associations to sponsoring a corps of volunteer docents, from establishing a pioneering children's museum to planning celebrations that open the Art Institute's doors to the widest possible public. A pathbreaking effort, this publication constitutes an important, unique contribution to the history of education in American cultural institutions.

A lavishly illustrated selection of highlights from the Art Institute of Chicago’s extraordinary collection of the arts of Africa Featuring a selection of more than 75 works of traditional African art in the Art Institute of Chicago’s collection, this stunning volume includes objects in a wide variety of media from regions across the continent. Essays and catalogue entries by leading art historians and anthropologists attend closely to the meanings and materials of the works themselves in addition to fleshing out original contexts. These experts also underscore the ways in which provenance and collection history are important to understanding how we view such objects today. Celebrating the Art Institute’s collection of traditional African art as one of the oldest and most diverse in the United States, this is a fresh and engaging look at current research into the arts of Africa as well as the potential of future scholarship.

"Presenting Antiquities at the Art Institute of Chicago was published in conjunction with the opening of Mary and Michael Jaharis Galleries of Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Art at the Art Institute of Chicago, November 11, 2012."

An updated selection of key paintings at the Art Institute of Chicago, featuring works from around the globe and dating from ancient Egypt to the present day The Art Institute of Chicago, one of the most beloved and important museums in the world, houses an extraordinary collection of objects from diverse places, cultures, and time periods. This beautiful catalogue opens the doors of the museum to readers, presenting an expansive selection of painted works from around the globe, introduced insightfully by James Rondeau, president and director of the Art Institute. New color photography accompanies entries written by a team of curators, art historians, and educators, which put the works into context. The book showcases a dazzling range of paintings, including an Egyptian funeral portrait, an ancient Mexican wall mural, Chinese scroll paintings, Japanese painted screens, and works by artists such as Caillebotte, Cassatt, El Greco, Gauguin, Homer, Hopper, Johns, Lichtenstein, Matisse, Mitsuoki, Monet, Morisot, Motley, O'Keeffe, Picasso, Pollock, Rembrandt, Richter, Rubens, Sargent, Seurat, Tiepolo, Turner, Van Gogh, Warhol, Whistler, and Wood; contemporary artists featured include Kerry James Marshall, Wanda Pimentel, and Kazuo Shiraga.

In 1922 Robert Allerton—described by the Chicago Tribune as the “richest bachelor in Chicago”—met a twenty-two-year-old University of Illinois architecture student named John Gregg, who was twenty-six years his junior. Virtually inseparable from then on, they began publicly referring to one another as father and son within a couple years of meeting. In 1960, after nearly four decades together, and with Robert Allerton nearing ninety, they embarked on a daringly nonconformist move: Allerton legally adopted the sixty-year-old Gregg as his son, the first such adoption of an adult in Illinois history. An Open Secret tells the striking story of these two iconoclasts, locating them among their queer contemporaries and exploring why becoming father and son made a surprising kind of sense for a twentieth-century couple who had every monetary advantage but one glaring problem: they wanted to be together publicly in a society that did not tolerate their love. Deftly exploring the nature of their design, domestic, and philanthropic projects, Nicholas L. Syrett illuminates how viewing the Allertons as both a same-sex couple and an adopted family is crucial to understanding their relationship’s profound queerness. By digging deep into the lives of two men who operated largely as ciphers in their own time, he opens up provocative new lanes to consider the diversity of kinship ties in modern US history.