🖼️ Art Institute of Chicago Scraper

🚀 Export the AIC catalog in seconds. Pull 131,000+ artworks across paintings, sculptures, photographs, prints, textiles, and decorative arts. No login, no API key, no manual CSV wrangling.

The Art Institute of Chicago Scraper exports the museum's public catalog and returns 38 fields per artwork, including title, artist, date, medium, dimensions, place of origin, classification, department, credit line, provenance text, and a direct IIIF high-resolution image link. The underlying dataset is one of the largest open museum catalogs in the world, maintained by AIC curators and continuously refreshed.

Coverage spans 131,945 records across 16 curatorial departments and 30+ classifications, from European old masters and Impressionist paintings to Japanese prints, African sculpture, and contemporary textiles. Records include public-domain flags and on-view status, so you can build galleries, study collections, or training sets without rights ambiguity.

🎯 Target Audience	💡 Primary Use Cases
Art historians, museum tech teams, EdTech builders, ML researchers, gallery apps, digital archivists, OSM contributors	High-resolution image datasets, provenance research, classroom slide decks, ML training (vision), gallery autocomplete, public-domain image discovery

📋 What the Art Institute of Chicago Scraper does

Two collection workflows in a single run:

• 🖼️ Browse the full catalog. Walk all 131,945 records in catalog order with optional filters.
• 🔍 Keyword search. Free-text query across titles, artists, mediums, and credit lines.
• 🏛️ Department filter. Restrict to one of 16 curatorial departments such as Modern and Contemporary Art or Photography and Media.
• 🎨 Classification filter. Narrow to one technique (painting, sculpture, etching, lithograph, woodblock print, photograph, and more).
• ✅ Public-domain only. Surface artworks released into the public domain for free reuse.
• 🪟 On-view only. Surface artworks currently on display in a museum gallery.

Each record includes the artist credit, dating, medium and dimensions, classification, department, provenance, credit line, and a direct IIIF image URL sized for web use.

💡 Why it matters: access to a structured, well-maintained museum catalog powers research projects, classroom slide decks, training data for vision models, and inspiration libraries for designers. The catalog mixes public-domain works that anyone can reuse with copyrighted contemporary holdings, and this scraper exposes that distinction in a single field.

📊 Data fields

Each record includes: artistDisplay, artistTitle, artworkId, artworkUrl, catalogueDisplay, classificationTitle, classificationTitles, colorfulness, colorHsl, creditLine, dateDisplay, departmentTitle, dimensions, exhibitionHistory, galleryTitle, imageUrl, isOnView, isPublicDomain, mainReferenceNumber, mediumDisplay, placeOfOrigin, provenanceText, publicationHistory, scrapedAt, sourceUpdatedAt, styleTitles, subjectTitles, techniqueTitles, themeTitles, title. These field names come straight from the actor's dataset schema, so what you see here is what lands in your dataset.

🚀 How to use

1. 📝 Sign up. Create a free account with $5 credit (takes 2 minutes).
2. 🌐 Open the Actor. Go to the Art Institute of Chicago Scraper page on the Apify Store.
3. 🎯 Set input. Pick a department, classification, search query, or leave defaults for a catalog browse.
4. 🚀 Run it. Click Start and let the Actor collect your data.
5. 📥 Download. Grab your results in the Dataset tab as CSV, Excel, JSON, or XML.

⏱️ Total time from signup to downloaded dataset: 3-5 minutes. No coding required.

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💡 Pro Tip: browse the complete ParseForge collection for more reference-data scrapers.

🆘 Need Help?

If you hit a bug, have questions about setup, or need a scraper we haven't built yet, open our contact form or write to parseforge@protonmail.com. We also take on paid custom data projects.

For faster answers, join our Discord. It's the best place to get support and suggest new actors.