Smart Museum of Art and Cochrane-Woods Art Center


Completed: 1974
Architect: Edward Larrabee Barnes
Address: 5540 S. Greenwood Ave.
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The Cochrane-Woods Art Center serves as the home for the Department of Art History and the award-winning Smart Museum of Art. Designed by Edward Larrabee Barnes in the 1970s, the complex features a striking Modernist design, with limestone-paneled buildings centered on a shared sculpture garden. The garden was redesigned in 2008 in partnership with UrbanLab and now includes river stones, sculptures, and a grid of natural spacers.

Smart Museum of Art
As the art museum of the University of Chicago, the Smart Museum of Art is home to thought-provoking special exhibitions and a permanent collection that spans five thousand years of artistic creation. Highlights of the collection include modern paintings by Mark Rothko, Arthur Dove, and Matta, the dining room furniture designed by Frank Lloyd Wright for the nearby Robie House, millenia-old ritual objects and scholarly scroll paintings from East Asia, Renaissance and Baroque painting and sculpture, important works by artists associated with the Monster Roster and Chicago Imagists, and contemporary art in all its forms from the across the globe.

The Smart is free and open to the public.