Art for which the idea (or concept) behind the work is more important than the finished art object.&nbsp;

Conceptual / Performance

<h3>Developed during the Italian Renaissance, primarily for aesthetics or beauty, the highest art was that which allowed the full expression and display of the artist's imagination.</h3>

Fine Prints & Painting – Pre 18th Century

<h3>Graphic Art covers a broad range of visual artistic expression, typically two-dimensional. It includes calligraphy, photography, painting, typography, computer graphics, and bindery.&nbsp;</h3>

Graphic Art

Works of art that utilize the form of the book. They are often published in small editions, though they are sometimes produced as one-of-a-kind objects.

Artists' Books

The exploration of video art and music or sound set, including visual music, abstract film, audiovisual performances and installations.

Video / Sound

The objects produced by shaping pieces of clay that are then hardened by baking, or the skill of making such objects.

Ceramics

An artistic form in which hard or plastic materials are carved, modeled, casted, and constructed into a three-dimensional art object.&nbsp;

Sculpture

The process of creating artworks by printing, typically on paper. Printmaking normally covers only the process of creating prints that have an element of originality, rather than just being a photographic reproduction of a painting.

Printmaking

<h3>Something made in an earlier period that is collected and considered to have value because it is beautiful, rare, old, or of high quality.</h3>

Antiques and Artifacts

Imagery where the subject matter centers around a view or depiction of Chicago.&nbsp;

Chicago Scenes & Regionalism

Old Masters refer to any painter of skill who worked in Europe before about 1800.

Old Masters

Socio-Political art is used to help the public understand a particular social or political issue.

Socio-Political

<h3>The attempt to represent subject matter truthfully, without artificiality and avoiding artistic conventions, or implausible, exotic, and supernatural elements.</h3>

Realism

<h3>Artwork (particularly paintings and sculptures) that is clearly derived from real objects and is representational.</h3>

Figurative

<h3>Individual works of art that are substantially or wholly made of glass. Glass art ranges in size from monumental works and installation pieces, to wall hangings and windows, to works of art made in studios and factories, including glass jewelry and tableware.</h3>

Glass

<h3>Artwork that often deals with Rococo, the Enlightenment, Neoclassicism, and Romanticism.</h3>

Fine Prints & Painting – 18th & 19th C.

From the Tate Museum's website: Modernism refers to a global movement in society and culture that from the early decades of the twentieth century sought a new alignment with the experience and values of modern industrial life. Building on late nineteenth-century precedents, artists around the world used new imagery, materials and techniques to create artworks that they felt better reflected the realities and hopes of modern societies.

Modernism

<h3>Contemporary artists work in a globally influenced, culturally diverse, and technologically advancing world. Their art is a dynamic combination of materials, methods, concepts, and subjects that continue to challenge boundaries.</h3>

Fine Prints & Painting – Contemporary

<h3>Art that is concerned with the design and decoration of objects that are chiefly prized for their utility, rather than for their purely aesthetic qualities including, ceramics, glassware, metalware, furniture, textiles, clothing, and more.</h3>

Furniture & Decorative Arts

<h3>Emerging art is work by artists who are still building their artistic careers and have not yet reached a more established and widely recognized status.&nbsp;</h3>

Emerging

<h3>Fiber art refers to fine art whose material consists of natural or synthetic fiber and other components, such as fabric or yarn. It focuses on the materials and on the manual labour on the part of the artist as part of the works' significance, and prioritizes aesthetic value over utility.</h3>

Fiber Arts / Textiles

The quality of dealing with ideas rather than events. Freedom from representational qualities in art.

Abstraction

<h3>Art by African-American artists.</h3>

African-American

<h3>The art and science of designing and making buildings, or the style of a building.</h3>

Architecture

<h3>Impressionism is a 19th-century art movement characterized by relatively small, thin, yet visible brush strokes, open composition, an emphasis on light and its changing qualities, and inclusion of movement as a crucial element of human perception and experience.</h3>

Impressionism

From the Tate Museum's website: Abstract expressionism is the term applied to new forms of abstract art developed by American painters such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning in the 1940s and 1950s. It is often characterized by gestural brush-strokes or mark-making, and the impression of spontaneity.

Abstract Expressionism

Numismatics

Relating to Africa or people of African descent.

African

Eastern European art is a product of recent history. It can be traced to the division of Europe into the Western and Soviet spheres of influence of the allied victory over Germany in World War two.

Eastern European

LGBTQIA+

Feminist

Considered one of the most influential periods of art, featuring movements including Fauvism, Cubism, Futurism, Dada, Surrealism, and Abstract Expressionism.

Early 20th Century

Skill and experience, especially in relation to making objects by hand.

Craft

<h3>The skill of making plans, drawings, or arrangements to show how a building or product is made.</h3>

Design

Asian art is diverse and rich, spanning thousands of years and dozens of countries. It is known for its ritual bronzes, beautiful ceramics, calligraphy, jades, textiles, painted landscapes, garden design, pagodas and stupas, and woodblock prints.

Asian

Italian

<h3>An artistic genre of three-dimensional works that often are site-specific and designed to transform the perception of a space.</h3>

Installations

An art form that combines visual art with dramatic performance.

Performance

Some of the most prominent, highly influential artists, who challenged preconceptions and pushed the limits of visual art, shaping the art world of our time.

Modern Contemporary Masters

Created in accordance with the vision of the artist as a photographer, using photography as a medium to bring something to life that only lives in the artist's mind.

Photography

The design movement in interior, product, graphic design, architecture, and urban development from roughly the 1930's to 1965.

Mid-Century

A movement in art and literature that flourished in the early 20th-century. Surrealism aimed at expressing imaginative dreams and visions free from conscious rational control.&nbsp;

Surrealism

An innovative discipline which seeks to unify a large range of art forms. This is creatively achieved by combining an array of artistic insights and crafts such as film, literature, performance, music and sound, drama, visual arts, or design.

Multi-Media

<h3>The depiction of landscapes in art—natural scenery such as mountains, valleys, trees, rivers, and forests, especially where the main subject is a wide view—with its elements arranged into a coherent composition.</h3>

Landscape

Plein air is the act of painting outdoors. This method contrasts with studio painting or academic rules that might create a predetermined look.

Plein-air

Printed 2-D artwork which is designed to be affixed to a vertical surface, may consist exclusively of images, or images and text.

Poster / Lithography

<h3>A portrait is a painting, photograph, sculpture, or other artistic representation of a person, in which the face and its expression is predominant. The intent is to display the likeness, personality, and even the mood of the person.</h3>

Portraits / Portraiture

<h3>These works are often stunningly beautiful, and encourage the viewer to engage with the rich history of research and experimentation that led to the piece’s conception.</h3>

Scientific

<h3>The Art of the American West is defined by geographical subject, consists of historic and contemporary works of art which focus on varying expressions of individuals, landscapes, ideals, and myths of the American West.</h3>

Western (The American West)

<h3>Borrowed from Wikipedia: In visual arts, music, and other mediums, minimalism is an art movement that began in post–World War II Western art, most strongly with American visual arts in the 1960s and early 1970s. Prominent artists associated with minimalism include Donald Judd, Agnes Martin, Dan Flavin, Robert Morris, Anne Truitt, and Frank Stella. It derives from the reductive aspects of modernism and is often interpreted as a reaction against abstract expressionism and a bridge to postminimal art practices.</h3>

Minimalism

<h3>Occupying the space between fine art and the everyday, functional art refers to aesthetic objects that serve utilitarian purposes. The genre is remarkably inclusive, it encompasses everything from furniture and lighting to dishes and even books.</h3>

Functional Art - Jewelry / Fashion

A range of artistic practices encompassing both historical approaches to nature in art and more recent ecological and politically motivated types of works.

Wildlife / Nature

Watches & Timepieces

Sports Collectibles

3-Dimensonal

Rare Books / Manuscripts

Western European art represents a continuous, though disrupted, tradition from antiquity until the present time. Until the mid-19th century it was primarily concerned with representational and Classical modes of production. After the mid-19th century modern, abstract and conceptual forms gained favor.

Western European

Comics

Large Scale (over 6')

Visual art created in public locations, usually unsanctioned artwork executed outside of the context of traditional art venues. Common forms and media include spray paint graffiti, stencil graffiti, poster art, sticker art, street installations, and sculpture.

Pop / Street Art / Graffiti

Indigenous & Native

Chicago Imagists

East Asian

Medieval / Renaissance 

Non-Western

Southeast & South Asian

<h3>Art produced by self-taught or naïve art makers. Typically, those labeled as outsider artists have little or no contact with the mainstream art world or art institutions. In many cases, their work is discovered only after their deaths. Often, outsider art illustrates extreme mental states, unconventional ideas, or elaborate fantasy worlds.</h3>

Folk / Outsider / Self Taught

American Regionalism

Literary Arts

Mosiac

Includes manuscripts, prints, drawings, collages, and paintings on paper.

Works on Paper

Prints and Drawings

West Asia  & North Africa

Middle Eastern & Islamic

Land Art

<h3>Artistic expression of Mexico, Central America, South America, the Caribbean, as well as Latin and Hispanic Americans living in other regions. Latin American art has roots in the many different indigenous cultures that inhabited the Americas before European colonization in the 16th-century.</h3>

Hispanic/Latinx

The International Museum of Surgical Science (IMSS) is the only museum in North America devoted exclusively to the history of surgery, while also embracing contemporary art exhibitions that engage with medicine, the body, and related themes. The IMSS is a division of the International College of Surgeons, founded by Max Thorek in 1934. The museum is housed in a historic 1917 mansion originally designed by architect Howard Van Doren Shaw for socialite Eleanor Robinson Countiss. The design was inspired by the French Petit Trianon (at Versailles). The building features four floors of gallery space and remains a fine example of early-20th-century luxury residential architecture now adapted for museum use. The IMSS aims to enrich people’s lives by enhancing their appreciation and understanding of the history, development, and advances in surgery and related subjects in health and medicine. While its core is medical history and surgical science, the museum also explicitly supports contemporary art exhibitions that explore the body, medicine, diagnostics, technology, and how they intersect with culture.&nbsp; For more information visit&nbsp;<a rel="noopener noreferrer" href="http://imss.org/" target="_blank">imss.org</a>. Image: Hall of Immortals, Michael Robinson Photography&nbsp;

International Museum of Surgical Science (IMSS)

The International Currents Gallery of the John David Mooney Foundation exhibits and offers residencies to international artists whose challenging work push boundaries and explore new territories.&nbsp;Lectures, workshops, and Master Classes are interwoven into Chicago’s diverse creative communities; exhibitions run concurrently in three galleries, each 4,000 sq. ft.&nbsp;Since 2022, the Foundation’s Art Bridge Fellowships have supported “At-Risk” artists from war-torn countries, including 16 Ukrainian artists and one Palestinian artist from the West Bank.&nbsp;The Albert I. Goodman Collection of wartime paintings, posters, and drawings from the 1960 and 70’s is on view in the third-floor gallery.&nbsp;This unique and important Collection serves as a study center for Chicago colleges and universities engaging in cross-cultural investigations.&nbsp;Ongoing are the Foundation’s environmental projects helping to control Climate Change in vibrant new ways through Art. The JDMF is a not-for-profit 501(c)3 educational arts organization. All events are free and open to the public. Image: Performance:&nbsp;Daria Holovchanska,&nbsp;“Night Call I,” January 21, 2024. Photo by JDM.

John David Mooney Foundation

The Chicago Architecture Biennial convenes the world to explore innovative ideas and collectively imagine the future of design. The Biennial’s large-scale exhibitions, talks, performances, films, and other events, create opportunities to engage timely global issues through the lens of architecture and design, emphasizing creativity and community participation. Free and open to the public, the Chicago Architecture Biennial stands as North America’s largest international survey of contemporary architecture and design. * ﻿CAB 6: SHIFT: Architecture in Times of Radical Change The 6th edition runs September 19, 2025–Feb 28, 2026 <a rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://chicagoarchitecturebiennial.org/" target="_blank">chicagoarchitecturebiennial.org</a> Image: Image:100 Links: Architecture and Land, in and out of the Americas, 2023,&nbsp;The Buell Center and AD—WO, Columbia University. Photo by Cory Dewald

Chicago Architecture Biennial

As a regional art museum that opened its doors in 1997, the Elmhurst Art Museum is committed to showing emerging and established contemporary artists, with a focus on the Chicagoland area and featuring local architects in major exhibits and programming in the McCormick House gallery. The development of their projects, public talks, involvement with our education center, and participation in public and school projects, along with the Museum’s growing collection of over 1,000 artworks, have been key foundations of the organization’s public offering. Image: Elmhurst Art Museum with Sentrock’s Bird City Saint. Image courtesy of Elmhurst Art Museum. Photo by Liz Chilsen.

Elmhurst Art Museum

The Richard H. Driehaus Museum engages and inspires the global community through exploration and ongoing conversations in art, architecture, and design of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Its permanent collection and temporary exhibitions are presented in an immersive experience within the restored Samuel Mayo Nickerson Mansion, completed in 1883, at the height of the Gilded Age, and the 1926 Murphy Auditorium. The Museum’s collection reflects and is inspired by the collecting interests, vision, and focus of its founder, the late Richard H. Driehaus.&nbsp;The Museum is located just steps from the Magnificent Mile. The exquisite building was saved twice, first by a collective of over 100 Chicago citizens in 1919, and then by philanthropist Richard H. Driehaus, who sponsored its restoration from 2003-2008.&nbsp;More information is available at <a rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://driehausmuseum.org" target="_blank">driehausmuseum.org</a> Our new entrance:&nbsp;50 E. Erie, at the Murphy Auditorium The Museum offers both private and guided tours and has a downloadable&nbsp;app for a self-guided experience. Consult the website for more information&nbsp;Image: The Maher Gallery. Photo by Alexander Vertikoff, 2011

The Driehaus Museum

The Chicago Cultural Center is a historic and architectural gem located in the heart of downtown Chicago. Originally built in 1897 as the city’s first public library, the Cultural Center is a stunning example of neoclassical architecture, featuring a grand marble staircase, magnificent Tiffany stained-glass dome, and ornate mosaics throughout the building.&nbsp; The Cultural Center is a vibrant hub of arts and culture, offering a wide range of free public programs, exhibitions, and events. Visitors can explore the building’s many galleries, performance spaces, and event rooms, which showcase a diverse array of visual art, music, dance, and theater. Whether you’re a local resident or a visitor to the city, the Cultural Center offers an enriching and inspiring experience that celebrates the power of art to unite and inspire. Image: the exterior of the Chicago Cultural Center as see from Michigan Ave.

Chicago Cultural Center

Wrightwood 659 presents exhibitions on socially engaged art and architecture, on issues facing LGBTQ+ communities, and on Asian art and architecture. Located in Chicago’s Lincoln Park neighborhood in a building transformed by Pritzker Prize winner Tadao Ando, Wrightwood 659 encourages visitors to engage with pressing issues of our time in an intimate and beautiful space.&nbsp; SPRING 2026 | April 17 – July 18, 2026Dispossessions in the AmericasMartin Wong: Chinatown USA FALL 2026 | September 25 – December 19, 2026One with Eternity: Yayoi KusamaYuan Goang-Ming: Everyday War” Join the e-news list at <a rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://wrightwood659.org" target="_blank">wrightwood659.org</a> to receive updates on exhibitions and programs. Admission to Wrightwood 659 is only available during the public showing of exhibitions. Advanced reservations are required and available exclusively at&nbsp;<a rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://wrightwood659.org" target="_blank">wrightwood659.org</a>. Walk-up admission cannot&nbsp;be accommodated.&nbsp;Image: Interior view of Wrightwood 659.Photography: © Jeff Goldberg/Esto,&nbsp;All Rights Reserved.

Wrightwood 659

The Madison Museum of Contemporary Art (MMoCA) is an independent organization that exhibits, collects, and preserves modern and contemporary art to provide transformative experiences that educate, reflect, and inspire us as individuals and a community. MMoCA fosters the exchange of ideas and creates experiences to inspire a wide audience. It is a nexus for the work of emerging and established regional, national, and international artists, serving as a catalyst for the continued development of a vigorous community of artists and provides a forum encouraging people to be challenged by, reflect on, and make connections between art and the world around them. Designed by world-renowned architect César Pelli, the Museum offers 51,500 sq. ft. of interior space, as well as the 7,100 sq. ft. Rooftop Sculpture Garden. Public amenities include spacious galleries that host rotating exhibitions, a 230-seat lecture hall, and a study center for drawings, prints, and photographs. MMoCA presents lectures, discussions, tours, and educational programming free of charge at the Museum. Additionally, MMoCA partners with regional artists for the bi-annual Gallery Night, provides a mobile art classroom to the region, and transforms downtown Madison for the annual Art Fair on the Square. Always admission-free. Museum exhibitions and most education programs at MMoCA are also free to the public. Image Courtesy of Sharon Vanorny

Architecture

The art and science of designing and making buildings, or the style of a building.

Other Specialties

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