The Art Institute of Chicago announced the top lots among its more than 1,000 acquisitions in 2025, with special notice going to key paintings and other holdings now in the collections of departments including prints and drawings, photography and media, textiles, and architecture and design.
The paintings include Kay WalkingStick’s The Silence of Glacier (2013), a two-panel work that overlays a Northern Chayenne beadwork pattern over top a landscape scene from Glacier National Park in Montana. “By layering the beadwork pattern over the landscape,” the museum’s press release reads, “Kay WalkingStick reclaims the Rocky Mountains as Native land and uplifts Indigenous sources of American abstraction.”
Other newly acquired paintings include Christian Schad’s Portrait of Composer Josef Matthias Hauer (1927), depicting an Austrian composer who developed a 12-tone musical composition in the 1920s, and Frans Francken II’s Esther Before Ahasuerus (1622), the first Flemish early modern painting to be acquired by the Art Institute in nearly 15 years.
The museum describes another highlight among the new holdings as “one of the most significant Indian textiles to come to the market in decades”: A Nayaka Nobleman with Courtiers and Courtesans, a hanging 17th-century textile made with the South Asian technique of kalamkari, involving hand-painting and dyed cotton.
Other notable new acquisitions include an untitled photograph from Francesca Woodman’s “Caryatid” series (1980), in which the late photographer performed the role of an ancient Greco-Roman columnar figure for a self-portrait imbued with painterly qualities by way of long exposure times, and the Ovejo Armchair (1972) by Colombian designer Jaime Gutiérrez Lega.
Tamil Nadu, India, A Nayaka Nobleman with Courtiers and Courtesans, 1640-1650.
Courtesy Art Institute of Chicago
