The Art Institute of Chicago announced its top acquisitions from over 1,000 works added to its collections in 2025. Highlights include Kay WalkingStick’s two-panel painting *The Silence of Glacier* (2013), which overlays Northern Cheyenne beadwork onto a Glacier National Park landscape; Christian Schad’s *Portrait of Composer Josef Matthias Hauer* (1927); Frans Francken II’s *Esther Before Ahasuerus* (1622); a rare 17th-century Indian textile titled *A Nayaka Nobleman with Courtiers and Courtesans*; an untitled photograph from Francesca Woodman’s “Caryatid” series (1980); and the *Ovejo Armchair* (1972) by Jaime Gutiérrez Lega.
These acquisitions matter because they reflect the museum’s strategic effort to diversify its holdings across media and cultures, from Indigenous American abstraction and early modern Flemish painting to South Asian textiles and late 20th-century design. The inclusion of works by Kay WalkingStick and the Indian textile signals a broader institutional commitment to underrepresented narratives, while the Francken painting fills a long gap in the museum’s Flemish collection.