Art Institute of Chicago

About Art Institute of Chicago

The Art Institute of Chicago API is a REST-style service providing JSON-formatted data about the museum's collection, including artworks, artists, and places. It is the same tool that powers the museum's website and mobile app, giving developers access to listing, detail, and search endpoints for these resources, with full-text search powered by Elasticsearch supporting term, exists, and bool queries as well as aggregations.

The API supports field selection via a fields parameter, pagination through page and limit parameters, and batching of queries via multi-id and multi-search (/msearch). It accepts queries through both GET and POST, with GET recommended for simple queries and POST for complex payloads. Image access follows the IIIF Image API, with documented conventions for sizes and manifests.

The API is intended for developers building applications that integrate the museum's public data, and the museum invites public applications to be shared alongside other projects using the API. For users needing the full dataset or facing throttling or deep-pagination issues, a nightly-updated data dump is available on GitHub as an alternative to querying the API directly, containing one JSON file per record with a schema mirroring the API.

Key features

• REST-style JSON API for the Art Institute of Chicago's collection data (artworks, artists, places)
• Listing, detail, and search endpoints for most resources
• Full-text and structured search via Elasticsearch Query DSL (term, exists, bool queries, aggregations)
• IIIF Image API support for retrieving artwork images at various sizes
• Nightly-updated bulk data dumps as an alternative to API pagination
• fields parameter to limit response payloads to specific fields

Frequently asked questions