The Museums: Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art

"One of the nation's largest facilities devoted to the art of our time, the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) offers exhibitions of the most thought-provoking art created since 1945. The MCA documents contemporary visual culture through painting, sculpture, photography, video and film, and performance. Located in the heart of downtown Chicago, the MCA boasts a gift store, bookstore, restaurant, 300-seat theater, and a terraced sculpture garden with a great view of Lake Michigan," according to the website. The site has information on current and upcoming exhibitions, which have featured artists from the sculptor Alexander Calder to British video artist Gillian Wearing; "Website Insights," an online archive of the MCA's holdings of approximately 6,000 objects that enables searching by artist name, nationality, title of work, medium, and the decade in which the work was produced. <http://www.mcachicago.org/>