Situated on the University of Illinois Chicago’s (UIC) campus, Jane Addams Hull-House Museum historicizes the influential social settlement from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. But little has been done to illuminate the innovative arts education piloted at Hull-House until now.
“Radical Craft: Arts Education at Hull-House, 1889-1935” does just that. The exhibition and accompanying catalog dig deep to show how educators and reformers envisioned arts and crafts as tools for social reform and connected those toiling in industrial labor with their inner creativity.
“Radical Craft: Arts Education at Hull-House, 1889-1935”
Through 7/25: Tue–Fri 10 AM–4:50 PM, Sun noon–4:50 PM, Jane Addams Hull-House Museum, 800 S. Halsted, hullhousemuseum.org/radical-craft
The show serves as a historical counterpoint to a companion exhibition at UIC’s Gallery 400, “Learning Together: Art Education and Community,” covering Chicago arts education from the mid-1960s through the 2010s.
“Radical Craft” is the first major exhibition in more than five years at the Hull-House and occupies most of the museum.
“There is a kind of truth to the larger understanding of Hull-House as the place where arts education in Chicago began,” Hull-House director Liesl Olson said. “The arts were always central to all of the other projects of social reform at Hull-House and . . . that part of our history hasn’t really been told.”
While Jane Addams is the most prominently known figure from Hull-House, this exhibition gives credit where credit is due to Ellen Gates Starr, a radical educator who believed art should be prioritized and taught to everyone, not just the wealthy elite. A variety of arts and crafts were offered at Hull-House, including drawing, painting, sculpture, textiles, bookbindery, ceramics, metal, woodworking, and basketry.
“When we think about Chicago as a city that really has led the country in terms of progressive arts education, where does that come from? It comes from Hull-House,” Olson said. “And it comes in particular from cofounder Ellen Gates Starr, about who very little has been written. She brought to Hull-House her principles that came out of the Arts and Crafts movement, her politics around labor, and the value of doing something with your hands in opposition to the grinding hours of work at nearby factories.”
The exhibition highlights the work of artists both celebrated and little known. The parlor is dedicated to Alice Kellogg Tyler, an artist who studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and in Paris and taught at Hull-House. Her portraits of women like Addams and Dr. Cornelia De Bey, have a prominent place near the beginning of the exhibition. Above the fireplace hangs a newly conserved painting, The Mother, of a woman looking tenderly at her baby lying across her lap. It is Kellogg Tyler’s best-known artwork, having been exhibited in 1891 in New York by the Society of American Artists and at the 1893 World’s Fair Columbian Exposition in the Fine Arts Building.
Also on the first floor, elegant books bound in Hull-House’s bookbindery show this rare art form “that upheld the value of slow craftsmanship in opposition to the quick and cheap operations of commercial printing,” according to Olson. Books featured include Christina Rossetti’s Poems and Sappho: Memoir, Text, Selected Renderings and a Literal Translation, which point to the sapphic lives lived by many of the leaders of Hull-House.
Winding up the staircase and throughout the second floor are the names of artists and artisans discovered in Hull-House yearbooks and bulletins, an attempt to name some of the community members who passed through the settlement, along with their art specialty.
“A lot of our focus has shifted to who was living in the neighborhood, who was participating in programs at Hull-House, how there was that social connection with the community,” education manager Nadia Maragha said. “We talk about Hull-House in terms of social work. We talk about it in terms of public health. We talk about it in terms of reform. But there isn’t as much conversation about how important it was to the community itself.”
The museum team is changing that with “Radical Craft.”
The exhibition also displays many artworks and craft objects from the museum collection that have rarely or never been shown before. These include a range of textiles and ceramics.
“So much of it was made during this period when Hull-House had what’s called the Labor Museum,” Olson said. “Social reformers invited immigrants to demonstrate their craft from the Old World.”
The largest room on the second floor is dedicated to textile arts. Beautifully mounted on the walls, lace, embroidery, weavings, doilies, and other textiles showcase the breadth of skills of the neighborhood’s residents. Two looms stand at the center of the room, one used to demonstrate techniques during special programming.
The other second-floor exhibition room is devoted to work made in the Hull-House kilns, particularly by Mexican immigrants, and paintings by both students and teachers. A wall of ceramics intermingles work by known and respected artists and talented but little-known artists from the collection.
The exhibition takes visitors on a journey throughout Hull-House; in each room, visitors can collect a section of a free booklet—in English or Spanish—that contains the exhibition text and photographs of most of the artwork on view. This is the first time a Hull-House exhibition has been fully translated into Spanish. When you finish touring the exhibition, you can bind your booklet with small paper fasteners, a nod to Starr’s passion for bookbinding.
The booklets aren’t the only tribute to Hull-House’s bookbindery. The catalog is also the first that Hull-House has published to coincide with an exhibition, beautifully bound with a fabric cover and printed on Venetian paper. Since accessibility was integral to Hull-House in its heyday, the catalog is modestly priced at $18.
Robust programming accompanies this show, and a new tour was developed specific to “Radical Craft.” A series of “Radical Mending” workshops led by the WasteShed will teach methods of clothing repair. “Weaving Stories,” in partnership with Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art, Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art and Balzekas Museum of Lithuanian Culture, will share stories of heritage, culture, and material practice on Sunday, September 29. And a workshop by Emily Winter from the Weaving Mill will center on weaving techniques, inspired by Hull-House’s historic textile collection on Thursday, December 5.
Maragha hopes people walk away with “a greater sense of how accessible arts education can be, and how there’s a need to offer it. And that there are still spaces . . . doing the same work as Hull-House was doing in terms of arts education.”
To that end, Hull-House has partnered with Red Line Service, an arts organization led by people experiencing homelessness, and Firebird Community Arts, which offers arts instruction to people living on the south and west sides, to host ceramics and glassblowing workshops. These will take place in the fall of 2024 and spring of 2025 and will include shared meals to build community.
“It’s a sort of extension of Hull-House’s history . . . the best kind of art programming for the people, communities who don’t have access to those materials,” Olson said. “Everybody has access to creativity at some level. But when you think of something like glassblowing . . . or ceramics . . . these are processes that are expensive, laborious, and that take a studio or equipment that’s really expensive.”
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