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Art Institute Chicago MCP Server

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Art Institute Chicago MCP Server is answering right now. Last checked 15 min ago. 70 installs a week from npm. It exposes 6 tools. Last commit 2 Oct 2026.

Search the Art Institute of Chicago collection: artworks, artists, exhibitions, and audio guides.

Installs per day peak 212 · avg 14 · -69% w/w
a month agotoday
Uptime history 10 days of history · worst day 99%
10 days agonow
100.0%
Uptime 24h
91 of 91 checks
6
Tools
read from the server
370 ms
Response time
average over 24h
70
Installs / week
npm and PyPI

Art Institute Chicago MCP Server missed one check this week

Everything else answered, so this is steady rather than shaky. We check every 15 minutes, which is how a one-off gets told apart from the start of a pattern, and how you hear about the next one within the hour instead of from your users.

Three servers free · no card

Connect this server

Endpoint below is the one we actually reach during checks — not the one copied from a README. Last verified 15 min ago.

run in your terminal
claude mcp add art-institute-chicago-mcp-server --transport http https://art-institute-chicago.caseyjhand.com/mcp
~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json
{
  "mcpServers": {
    "art-institute-chicago-mcp-server": {
      "url": "https://art-institute-chicago.caseyjhand.com/mcp"
    }
  }
}
~/.codex/config.toml
[mcp_servers.art-institute-chicago-mcp-server]
url = "https://art-institute-chicago.caseyjhand.com/mcp"
.cursor/mcp.json
{
  "mcpServers": {
    "art-institute-chicago-mcp-server": {
      "url": "https://art-institute-chicago.caseyjhand.com/mcp"
    }
  }
}
.vscode/mcp.json
{
  "mcpServers": {
    "art-institute-chicago-mcp-server": {
      "url": "https://art-institute-chicago.caseyjhand.com/mcp"
    }
  }
}

This one needs environment variables set before it will start: MCP_HTTP_HOST (The hostname for the HTTP server.), MCP_HTTP_PORT (The port to run the HTTP server on.), MCP_HTTP_ENDPOINT_PATH (The endpoint path for the MCP server.), MCP_AUTH_MODE (Authentication mode to use: 'none', 'jwt', or 'oauth'.), AIC_CONTACT (Contact the museum can reach (an email or URL, printable ASCII), sent in the AIC-User-Agent header on every request. Defaults to the repository URL; set your own for any deployment.), AIC_REQUESTS_PER_MINUTE (Outbound request budget per minute for api.artic.edu (1-600). Defaults to 50, under the published 60 per minute anonymous limit.), MCP_LOG_LEVEL (Sets the minimum log level for output (e.g., 'debug', 'info', 'warn').). The author declared them in the registry entry; get the values from the project itself.

Available tools 6

Read directly from the server with tools/list, grouped by what they act on. If a tool disappears, we record the date.

artic
artic_get_artworks
Fetch full Art Institute of Chicago records for up to 10 artworks by id: description, provenance, exhibition and publication history, dimensions, inscriptions, credit line, categorization, gallery, image URLs with rights status, and related multimedia. Long histories are opt-in through sections. Ids come from artic_search_artworks, artic_search_exhibitions, or artic_search_artists.
artic_lookup_vocabulary
List the values of an Art Institute of Chicago collection vocabulary with how many artworks carry each, most common first, optionally narrowed by a substring. Each value passes to the artic_search_artworks filter of the same name exactly as listed (case is ignored). Counts here span the whole collection; for counts within a filtered set of artworks, request facets from artic_search_artworks.
artic_search_artists
Find artists, cultures, and organizations in the Art Institute of Chicago collection by name, or fetch them by id. Each result carries life dates, agent type, alternate names, how many of the museum's artworks credit them, and up to three of their works, the museum's highlighted works first. Pass an id to artic_search_artworks as artist_id to browse all of their works.
artic_search_artworks
Search the Art Institute of Chicago collection by text and structured filters, ranked by relevance or sorted by date. Text matches all words across titles, artists, descriptions, provenance, and other catalog fields. Filters combine with AND. Results reach the first 1,000 matches; narrow with filters for more. Set limit to 0 with facets to get only counts. Use artic_lookup_vocabulary for filter values and artic_get_artworks for full records.
artic_search_audio_guide
Search the Art Institute of Chicago's mobile audio-guide stops by text, matching stop titles and transcripts. Returns each stop's title, MP3 URL, and transcript text. Stops carry no artwork id, so match a stop to a work by its title; for a known artwork, artic_get_artworks related_media lists the recordings linked to it. Some stops are in Spanish, and titles are sometimes internal file names. This content is for noncommercial educational and personal use only: keep the copyright notice and cite the Art Institute of Chicago.
artic_search_exhibitions
Search Art Institute of Chicago exhibitions by text and date: what is on now, what is coming, or past shows on a topic. Results carry dates, gallery, summary, web page, and the artworks shown when the museum lists them. Pass artwork ids to artic_get_artworks for full records.

Endpoints

URLTransportStateLatencyChecked
https://art-institute-chicago.caseyjhand.com/mcp streamable-http answering 231 ms 15 min ago

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Art Institute Chicago MCP Server — questions

Answers built from our own checks of this server.

What can Art Institute Chicago MCP Server do?
It exposes 6 tools, read directly from the server on our last check. Among them: artic_get_artworks, artic_lookup_vocabulary, artic_search_artists, artic_search_artworks, artic_search_audio_guide, artic_search_exhibitions. The full list with descriptions is on this page — we take it from the server itself via tools/list, not from a README. How MCP servers expose tools in the first place →
Is Art Institute Chicago MCP Server working right now?
We send a real MCP handshake every 15 minutes. Over the last 24 hours 91 of 91 checks got a reply (100.0%), average response time 370 ms. The bar chart above shows every period we have measured.
How do I connect Art Institute Chicago MCP Server?
Copy the ready config from this page — we generate it for Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Codex, Cursor and VS Code, each with the file path that client actually reads. It is a remote server, so there is nothing to install — the client connects to the address.
Does Art Institute Chicago MCP Server need an API key?
No. Art Institute Chicago MCP Server completed a full MCP handshake with us as an anonymous client and listed its tools without asking for anything. All 6 of them are readable on this page. This is what we observed, not what the docs claim.
How fast is Art Institute Chicago MCP Server?
It answers our handshake in 370 ms on average, which is faster than 37% of all working MCP servers we measure. The comparison comes from our own checks across the whole registry, every 15 minutes.
How many people use Art Institute Chicago MCP Server?
The npm package @cyanheads/art-institute-chicago-mcp-server was installed 70 times in the last week. Week over week that is -69%. We show installs rather than GitHub stars on purpose: a star is a bookmark, an install is someone actually running it.
Is Art Institute Chicago MCP Server open source?
Yes — it is published under the Apache-2.0 licence, written in TypeScript and 1 stars on GitHub. The source link is on this page, so you can read exactly what it does with your data before you connect it.