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Chicago: The City in Art is a collaborative project between The Art Institute of Chicago and the Chicago Public Schools. The program is designed to introduce teachers and students to recently restored murals in their schools. It began in 1995 with Lane Technical High School and was expanded in 1998-2000 to include ten additional elementary schools. The goals of the program are to broaden awareness of the rich cultural educational resources in our public schools and to integrate the arts into classroom curriculum. Teachers and students works in the permanent collection of the Art Institute as a foundation for the study of artists, movements, and styles. A final and extremely important goal is to encourage the continued preservation of the Chicago Public Schools' cultural treasures.

On July 4, 1909, Daniel H. Burnham and the Commercial Club of Chicago unveiled the culmination of three years of work and a decade of preparation. The Plan of Chicago, considered a fundamental urban planning document, presented one group’s radical vision for a more beautiful, orderly, and unified city. And with its lush illustrations and rousing prose, it dared its readers to not only imagine a different Chicago, but to strive to create it themselves. The Plan is remarkable for several reasons. For one, in the wake of industrialization and an influx of population (including many immigrants), it refined the meaning of prosperity in a growing city, probing the quality of urban life there. The Plan also discerned Chicago’s broader interconnectivity with cities across the Midwest, considering the city’s impact on the surrounding plains and encouraging a more regional approach. But perhaps the most striking—and uniquely American—aspect of the Plan was its idealistic belief in Chicago as a city without limits. The planners believed their city could become the most beautiful and prosperous in the world, and they inspired its citizens to undertake the challenge. This exhibition presents a selection of original drafts, letters, meeting minutes, and images related to the Plan of Chicago, from the collections at the Ryerson & Burnham Archives at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Spectacular and sophisticated, the royal sculptures and regalia from the West African Kingdom of Benin are among the continent’s most acclaimed works of art. This landmark exhibition, representing six centuries of Benin's rich artistic heritage, brings together more than 220 of these masterworks from collections around the world and makes its sole North American stop at the Art Institute of Chicago. Planned with the most prominent scholars of Benin art, history, and culture, as well as the cooperation of reigning Oba Erediauwa and the National Commission for Museums and Monuments, Nigeria, Benin—Kings and Rituals brings international attention and new perspectives to Benin art and history.

Edward Hopper (1882–1967), creator of art that novelist John Updike described as "calm, silent, stoic, luminous, and classic," is one of the most enduring and popular American painters of the 20th century. A pivotal artist who was intensely private, Hopper made solitude and introspection important themes in his paintings, which have been celebrated as a part of the very grain and texture of the American experience.

"The Magic of America," a typescript of over 1,400 pages with approximately 650 accompanying illustrations, was written and compiled by Marion Mahony Griffin (1871-1961), architect, designer, delineator, and artist. In 1911 she married Walter Burley Griffin (1876-1937), architect, landscape designer, and city planner. Their architectural practice spanned almost four decades on three continents, and "The Magic of America" was meant, in part, to be a testament to their life and work together. "The Magic of America: Electronic Edition" collates in a digital format all the texts and illustrations from the three known copies of the work. The electronic edition thus represents the most complete and accessible version currently available of this important architectural document.

This landmark exhibition is devoted to the marine paintings of Edouard Manet (1832–1883), a little-studied but highly significant aspect of the career of the artist who is sometimes referred to as the father of Impressionism. Taking Manet’s seascapes—ranging from 1864 to shortly before his death in 1883—as a point of departure, the exhibition traces the complex interactions that link the artist to his immediate predecessors and contemporaries, including Gustave Courbet, Eugène Delacroix, Claude Monet, Berthe Morisot, and James McNeill Whistler, among others. Manet and the Sea brings together innovative works on sea-related themes by a variety of artists with differing ambitions. At the same time, it addresses emergent sociohistorical phenomena, especially the increase of tourism, which made the sea newly attractive to artists in the second half of the 19th century.

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.