Art Institute of Chicago Artworks Scraper

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Scrape artwork records from the Art Institute of Chicago's open REST API. Returns full metadata for 131k+ artworks including title, artist, department, medium, dimensions, classification, style/subject taxonomy, dominant colour analysis (HSL), and IIIF image URLs. No API key required — the AIC API is fully public with CC0 metadata.

What you get

Each scraped record contains:

Modes

Walk mode (default)

Paginate through the full collection of 131k+ artworks:

{
"mode":"walk",
"maxItems":1000
}

Omit maxItems to walk the entire collection.

Add publicDomainOnly: true to restrict results to CC0 artworks (image downloads safe):

{
"mode":"walk",
"publicDomainOnly":true,
"maxItems":500
}

Search mode

Full-text keyword search across all artwork metadata:

{
"mode":"search",
"query":"impressionism",
"maxItems":100
}

Filter mode

Filter by artwork type, department, or date range:

{
"mode":"filter",
"artworkTypeTitle":"Painting",
"dateFrom":1880,
"dateTo":1920,
"maxItems":200
}

Available filters:

• artworkTypeTitle — artwork type string (e.g. "Painting", "Drawing", "Print", "Sculpture", "Photograph")
• departmentTitle — department name string (e.g. "Photography and Media", "Painting and Sculpture of Europe")
• dateFrom — filter artworks with date_start >= this year
• dateTo — filter artworks with date_start <= this year

Combine multiple filters in one run.

By-ID mode

Fetch specific artworks by their AIC numeric ID:

{
"mode":"by_ids",
"artworkIds":[16568,27992,28560],
"maxItems":10
}

IDs can be found in AIC URLs: https://www.artic.edu/artworks/16568/water-lilies.

Use cases

• Art analytics datasets — combine with the Met Museum actor for a comprehensive GLAM collection
• Colour research — the color_h/s/l fields enable colour-palette analysis across 131k artworks
• Style/subject taxonomy — style_titles and subject_titles provide ready-made ML training labels
• Public-domain image pipelines — filter is_public_domain: true and use iiif_image_url for CC0 downloads
• Museum collection monitoring — run incrementally to detect newly added records

Rate limits

The AIC API is fully open — no authentication required. The actor runs at ~60 requests/minute with a 1-second delay between pages, well within the API's polite-use advisory. No proxy is needed.