Moments from Art Institute of Chicago

The bronze lions flanking the Michigan Avenue entrance have guarded the building since 1893, cast for the World's Columbian Exposition and installed as the museum's mascots almost immediately afterward, and Chicagoans still dress them in team jerseys and holiday scarves depending on the season. Founded in 1879, the Art Institute grew into one of the collections that essentially taught mid-century America what modern painting looked like: Grant Wood's American Gothic, Georges Seurat's A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, and Edward Hopper's Nighthawks all live here, three images so absorbed into popular culture that seeing the actual canvases can be genuinely disorienting, they're smaller and stranger in person than their reproductions prepare you for.

The Modern Wing, a glass-and-steel addition by Renzo Piano completed in 2009, connects to the original Beaux-Arts building via a footbridge over Monroe Street and is worth timing for late morning, when north light floods the top floor galleries. If you only have an hour, skip the special exhibitions and go straight to the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist rooms, then the American wing for Wood and Hopper. The Grande Jatte in particular rewards standing close enough to see the dots dissolve into brushwork and then stepping back until they reassemble into a picture, Seurat built the whole method around that exact effect.