Curious Corner is an Art Institute of Chicago website designed for children (ages 3–12), their friends, and families. Explore and learn about art from around the world. Look closely and investigate artworks. Connect personal experience with artworks through playful, creative activities. Parents and educators of all kinds can also explore related online resources that help foster learning in the home, classroom, and museum. Curious Corner is also available on computer stations in the Vitale Family Room of the Ryan Education Center and in Gallery 10 at the foot of the Grand Staircase.

In 1887 Ambroise Vollard (1866–1939) arrived in Paris with few contacts and no credentials to pursue a career as an art dealer. He began representing artists that were undervalued, exhibiting them at a time when many galleries were not willing to take the risk. In 1895 Vollard hosted Cézanne’s first solo exhibition, and in doing so he made the artist’s reputation as well as his own. By the early 20th century, Vollard had become the principal dealer of artists such as Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, and a number of Fauve artists, and lent early support to artists who are well known today—Pierre Bonnard, Aristide Maillol, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and Edouard Vuillard—as well as many who remain relatively unknown. His shrewd mind for business and artistic sense made him the leading contemporary art dealer of his generation. Cézanne to Picasso: Ambroise Vollard, Patron of the Avant-Garde draws upon the dealer’s archives—handwritten sale and purchase records, stockbooks, photography, and correspondence—to shed new light not only on Vollard’s business strategies but also on the heretofore unexplored story of his relationships with artists whose work he exhibited and sold. The exhibition underscores Vollard’s achievement in promoting careers and styles to collectors, art critics, and artists, who used his gallery as a meeting place to discuss and buy modern art. Special galleries devoted to individual artists feature works from Vollard’s most important exhibitions, including paintings from his groundbreaking 1895 Cézanne show, a never-before reassembled triptych from Vollard’s 1896 Van Gogh retrospective, and, from Gauguin’s important 1898 exhibition of Tahitian works, the masterpiece Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? lent by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and on view for the first time ever in Chicago.

Aerospace Design: The Art of Engineering from NASA’s Aeronautical Research explores the architecture and engineering of wind tunnels by displaying approximately 90 objects from NASA’s collection, including wind tunnel models and flight artifacts, past and present. The exhibition commemorates the centennial of powered, controlled flight that began with the landmark take off of the Wright brothers on December 17, 1903. Objects included in the exhibition date back to NASA’s predecessor, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), founded in 1915. Created out of that agency at the beginning of the space race in 1958, NASA has a wealth of often unexhibited and unpublished artifacts that not only document technological advances in flight over the past century but are also aesthetically striking. Beyond the historic dimension, the exhibition showcases some of the latest research being done for aircrafts with "morphing" wings, self-healing vehicle "skins" and biologically inspired sensors—elements that NASA hopes will make future air travel accident free, environmentally friendly, and affordable and accessible. In all, the project presents the history of aeronautically engineered forms in relation to architecture and design, much as previous Art Institute exhibitions have analyzed architecture and design for commercial aviation, space travel, and contemporary railroad travel. Visitors are shown another example of how aviation design is as beautiful as it can be functional.

Harlequin is one of the most recognizable and enduring figures of the Commedia dell'Arte, an improvised form of theater performed by masked actors that originated in the mid-16th century in northern Italy but soon spread to the streets and courts of Europe. Commedia dell'Arte troupes were especially popular at the French court, where their performances were enjoyed for nearly two centuries. These shows involved drama, comic skits, and acrobatic routines not necessarily linked to any one story. Stock characters were identified by specific masks, costumes, and accessories. Although these have changed little today, the personalities of the characters have evolved. Harlequin, for example, was originally an oafish but agile figure from the Italian region of Bergamo, whose poverty was symbolized by a costume of multicolored patches. By the late 18th century, he had developed into a quick-witted trickster. His diamond-patterned suit now referred to his physical agility and to his multifaceted nature, at once cunning and foolish, shrewd and absurd.

This exhibition combines an outstanding selection of the Art Institute's impressive holdings of American art with both public and private regional collections to examine Chicago’s role in defining the West through the visual arts, beginning at the turn of the century. As the gateway that linked the eastern and western economies and cultures, the city of Chicago came to typify modernity and to serve as an important locus for the industrial, technological, and artistic developments that helped shape 20th-century America. Ambitious businessmen, industrialists, and a hard working population of laborers made the city the agricultural, livestock, and railroad hub of the nation. Chicago's economic leaders also became its most prominent art patrons, working together to establish powerful institutional networks. These leaders also supported artists who were drawn to subjects celebrating the American West. Without patrons such as Charles Hutchinson, Oscar Mayer, Carter Harrison, and George Harding, and institutions such as the Art Institute, the Newberry Library, the Field Museum, and the Santa Fe Railway, western art would have had little national recognition at the turn of the century. More than 100 works of art—paintings, sculpture, decorative arts, and works on paper—trace the ways in which class, ethnicity, and the city's often infamous politics determined collecting habits and how these, in turn, affected the images that artists used to depict the West, from the rugged cowboys and scouts of Frederic Remington to the abstract desert landscapes and still lifes of Georgia O'Keeffe.

Silk Road Chicago is an unprecedented collaboration among the Art Institute of Chicago, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, and the Silk Road Project that explores the cross-cultural artistic legacy of the historic network of overland and maritime trade routes between China and the Mediterranean Sea. This collaboration occurs in the heart of Chicago, a city long renowned as a meeting place for people from all across the world.

During his lifetime, American modernist John Marin was the country’s most celebrated artist. His improvisational approach to color, paint handling, perspective, and movement situated him as a leading figure in modern art and helped influence the Abstract Expressionist movement. This exhibition—the first to present the Art Institute of Chicago’s phenomenal collection of the artist's work in its entirety—ranges from early images rooted in traditional practice to more personal and experimental compositions, showcasing how Marin, in the process of reinventing watercolor, transformed American painting.

A Sunday on La Grande Jatte—1884 is one of the most beloved, famous, and frequently reproduced paintings in the world. Seen by tens of millions of viewers since it entered the Art Institute's collection in 1924, the painting is an icon and a destination in itself for visitors. This exhibition of approximately 130 paintings and works on paper at once celebrates and sheds new light on Georges Seurat’s masterpiece by bringing together approximately 45 of the artist’s paintings and drawings related to the picture—from rich, yet delicate, conté crayon studies to oil sketches on small wood panels to nearly full-size paintings. The exhibition presents some of Seurat’s early works and shows the remarkable transformation of his colors and subject matter around 1883–85, when he started to explore the modern-life subjects, high-keyed colors, and broken brushwork of Impressionism. The exhibition features paintings by Claude Monet, Pierre Auguste Renoir, and Camille Pissarro, all painters whom Seurat greatly admired. These artists’ depictions of figures at the seaside, boating, or promenading through fields would resonate in Seurat’s unabashed tribute to modern leisure. Also included are works by Paul Signac and Lucien Pissarro, artists who shared similar interest in the pointillist technique and whose works were featured in the same exhibition that launched La Grande Jatte to a Parisian public.