Art Institute of Chicago#

One of the oldest and largest art museums in the United States, the Art Institute of Chicago holds nearly 300,000 works. Their public API exposes rich data about artworks, artists, and exhibitions — no API key required.

Tools#

ToolDescriptionsearch_artworksFull-text search across the entire collection (e.g., "monet water lilies")get_artworkFetch a detailed record for a single artwork by its ARTIC IDget_artistBiographical info and associated works for an artist by IDget_exhibitionsBrowse current and past exhibitions

When you'd use this#

• Answering questions about specific paintings or artists in the ARTIC collection
• Pulling structured art data for educational apps or classroom tools
• Cross-referencing exhibitions when planning a trip to Chicago
• Feeding artwork descriptions into downstream analysis or summarization

Try it out#

Look up Grant Wood's American Gothic (artwork ID 6565):

bash

curl -s -X POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/artic/mcp \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":1,"method":"tools/call","params":{"name":"get_artwork","arguments":{"id":6565}}}'

Returns title, artist, date, medium, dimensions, image URL (via IIIF), description, and provenance.

MCP client config#

json

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "pipeworx-artic": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "mcp-remote@latest", "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/artic/mcp"]
    }
  }
}

Notes#

• Image URLs use the IIIF protocol — you can append size parameters to request specific dimensions
• Search supports up to 100 results per call
• All data is free and open-access