Having exhausted myself at the National Gallery of Art recently, it is nice to visit a museum that is smaller is scale and can be fully digested in one afternoon. A $10 adult admission fee gets you 2 days admittance to both locations of the Mint (Uptown and Randolph). Special exhibits are extra.
I visited only the permanent collection of the Mint Museum Uptown, which occupies two floors of the building. The 3rd floor houses the "craft + design galleries" and the 4th floor has "American & contemporary art galleries."
It was nice to see something other than painting and drawing in an art museum and I enjoyed the amazing wood, glass, metal, and clay crafts on the 3rd floor. I spent alot of time looking at Marilyn Levine's "Black School Bag." At first I was trying to figure out why a leather school bag was one display. Then I realized that it was actually made of ceramic and spent alot of time figuring out how she made a ceramic bag look like real worn pebbled leather.
In the 4th floor gallery I enjoyed especially Gene Davis's "Jack in the Box" - read the explanatory note for how to view the work. Also, Kehinde Wiley's "Philip the Fair," which portrays a younger black man in a Houston Astros jersey. See: http://www.artnews.com/2007/06/01/in-your-face/
I'm looking forward to going back again and checking out the Randolph location.