Art Institute of Chicago

You can access the Art Institute of Chicago collection through natural language interactions by using a dedicated MCP server. This server lets you search artworks, retrieve detailed information, and generate an interactive gallery experience for a given artist, all through simple queries and prompts.

How to use

Use an MCP client to connect to the Art Institute of Chicago MCP Server. You can ask for things like searching by title, getting full details about a specific artwork, performing full-text searches, finding artworks by an artist, or locating artworks by a particular medium. You can also generate an interactive art gallery prompt for a chosen artist to visualize their body of work.

How to install

Prerequisites: you need Node.js and npm installed on your system. You also need an MCP client that can connect to an MCP server. Follow the steps below to enable the Art Institute of Chicago MCP Server in your environment.

1. Add the server configuration to your Claude Desktop setup. Create or edit your claude_desktop_config.json to include the MCP server entry.

{
  "mcp-servers": {
    "artic-museum": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": [
        "-y",
        "artic-mcp"
      ]
    }
  }
}

Additional sections

Configuration details are provided for connecting to the MCP server. In this case, the server can be referenced by the identifier artic-museum with the stdio-based run command shown above. To install and run the server via Smithery, you can use the following command to add the MCP server client side integration for Claude.

npx -y @smithery/cli install @mikechao/artic-mcp --client claude

Tools and capabilities

This MCP server provides a set of tools to interact with the Art Institute of Chicago collection. You can search by title, retrieve artwork details, perform full-text searches, search for artists, find artworks by an artist, and search by medium. Each tool returns relevant metadata such as titles, IDs, descriptions, and visual previews when available.

Examples of queries

• Can you show me the painting titled "Nighthawks"?
• Find artworks by Vincent van Gogh in 1890 that are on display.
• Show me works by the artist Jackson Pollock.

Available tools

search-by-title

Search artworks by title with optional pagination controls (limit and page) and return matching artworks with IDs, titles, thumbnails, and scores.

get-artwork-by-id

Retrieve detailed information for a specific artwork by its ID, including an image when available, with metadata such as title, artist, origin, dimensions, medium, and gallery location.

full-text-search

Perform a full-text search across artworks’ metadata for the given query, with pagination support and scoring to rank results.

search-for-artist

Search for an artist by name and return matched artists with IDs and scores to help locate the correct artist.

get-artwork-by-artist

Find artworks by a given artist ID, returning a list of artworks with IDs, titles, thumbnails, and scores.

search-by-medium

Search artworks by a specified medium (e.g., oil on canvas) and present results with IDs, titles, thumbnails, and scores.

art-gallery-prompter

Generate an interactive HTML art gallery prompt for a selected artist to visualize their works in a browser-based view.