Asian Art Museum

The Asian Art Museum boasts one of the largest collections of Asian art outside of Asia. Housed in a 1917 Beaux Arts building (the city’s former Main Library), the Asian Art Museum was designed by Gae Aulenti, an Italian architect specializing in the adaptive reuse of historic structures. (In the mid-1980s, she converted a defunct 1900 Paris railway station into the acclaimed Musée d’Orsay). The collection spans 6,000 years and contains more than 16,000 artifacts, roughly half of them originally donated to the city by Chicago industrialist Avery Brundage, including a gilt-bronze Buddha dated A.D. 338, the oldest known dated Chinese Buddha. The galleries, organized by geographic region (China, Japan, Korea, Southeast Asia, South Asia, the Himalayas and the Tibetan Buddhist World, the Persian World and West Asia), elegantly showcase ceramics, ritual bronzes, jades, calligraphy, painted screens, bamboo baskets, woodblock prints, textiles and jewelry. Closed Monday.