Jane Addams’s father encouraged her early love of reading by offering a nickel for every book she finished, and as the coin jar overflowed, she found herself increasingly drawn to writers who fused social reform with an appreciation for art. When she met Ellen Gates Starr at Rockford Female Seminary, the two bonded over their shared love of Leo Tolstoy, John Ruskin, and especially William Morris. Born a year apart, in 1859 and 1860, to prominent Illinois families with progressive ideas about women’s education and social equality, they seemed destined to change Chicago’s political and artistic landscape together. “Let’s love each other through thick and thin and work out a salvation,” Addams once wrote to Starr, and in their lifelong collaboration there was never a doubt that salvation lay in socialism. Together they took up Morris’s motto for the Arts and Crafts Movement: “The cause of art is the cause of the people.” They considered art the highest expression of human labor, and they believed that the way to foster a more flourishing society was to empower all people to share in the work.
Their theoretical framework found its practical template on a tour of Europe in 1888, where Addams visited Toynbee Hall in London’s East End—a “social settlement house” providing meals, education, and other services. Inspired by this model, Addams and Starr soon found a site for their own settlement amid the tenements of Chicago’s Nineteenth Ward. At the time, Chicago was the fastest growing city in the world, its population doubling from roughly 500,000 to over a million between 1880 and 1890. Immigrants came to work in the city’s stockyards, steel plants, and textile mills, making the Nineteenth one of the most diverse but also poorest wards. Though first imagined as “a community of university women,” as Addams put it, Hull-House’s volunteer staff (known as “residents”) quickly grew to include members of the local immigrant communities. By prioritizing cross-class collaboration and solidarity among those marginalized by the established order, Addams and Starr departed from the Christian charity model that animated their British forebears toward an egalitarian vision of participatory democracy. Still, women made up the majority of Hull-House’s residents—possibly because supporting broad social equality in that era was fundamentally a feminist act.
By this time, Starr had earned a reputation as a dynamic art teacher at the private Miss Kirkland’s School, where she was a perennial favorite among the daughters of Chicago’s elite. Some of these students, having grown into women with ideals and inheritances, became Hull-House’s first major donors. The settlement began as one grand Italianate mansion, donated by Starr’s friend and fellow teacher Helen Culver (cousin of its original owner, Charles J. Hull), and eventually expanded to thirteen buildings that at its peak saw over two thousand daily visitors. But in the 1960s, much of the Nineteenth Ward was leveled in the name of “urban renewal” when Mayor Richard J. Daley and his corporate backers authorized construction of the University of Illinois Chicago’s sprawling brutalist campus. Building a public university provided a convenient cover for clearing away what they saw as urban blight, despite mass protests indicating that this transformation was not what many Chicagoans wanted for the Near West Side. In the process, all but two of Hull-House’s thirteen buildings were demolished. They are now the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum, and the old mansion is its exhibition space.
On view through July 27, Radical Craft: Arts Education at Hull-House, 1889–1935 is an ambitious exhibition that returns to the Museum’s roots as a center for community organizing through educational outreach. Handbound books, textiles, ceramics, and other crafts created at Hull-House form the basis of the exhibition, complemented by archival photographs and extensive wall text documenting the institution’s varied experiments integrating arts education and craft production into its broader project of social welfare. Bringing those experiments into the present, the Museum has also planned a series of free events in collaboration with local arts organizations similarly dedicated to public service.
In fact, the result transcends conventional exhibitions. The museum’s curators call it an “initiative,” which suggests a dynamic force: not a static display of artifacts from the past but a program of activities they have taken up and carried forward. “Our aim is to bridge the histories of Hull-House with our current moment by offering opportunities to find ‘the restorative power in the genuine exercise of a craft,’” writes Museum Director Liesl Olson in her catalog introduction, quoting Addams. So rich and varied are these opportunities that I found myself returning again and again, though I would say that my experiences were less restorative than galvanizing. Radical Craft recenters Hull-House’s arts programming within the institution’s democratic-socialist framework, and across three visits, its perspective left me with an enlivened appreciation for the politics of craftwork.
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The liveliness of the exhibition is heightened by how the house remains legible, beneath the white walls and spotlighting, as a living space. The galleries, retaining their ornate molding, baseboards, and other decorative elements, are named for the original functions they served within the house. On the second floor, Addams’s bedroom is preserved as it was when she lived there, complete with Morris & Co. wallpaper. These touches, together with several interactive elements, underscore the curators’ invitation to thread Hull-House’s past into the present progressive.
Across the long hallway from Addams’s bedroom stands a tapestry loom. Even for a work in progress, the textile looks to be in riotous flux. The weft threads swerve freely across the warp, giving the piece a sense of motion and generous negative space through which light filters from the windows behind. It seems that every thread is a different color, showcasing the chromatic signature of each visitor who has contributed to the weaving. Loose strands hang off the warp, marking where a weaver decided to cease. Nearby, a basket spills over with yarn, and beside it a sign invites visitors to choose a strand and add to the work.
On the ground floor, displays in the parlor and rotunda highlight two of the institution’s earliest efforts to make art the cause of the people. The more successful was the Chicago Public School Arts Society, a program founded in 1894 as one of the nation’s first public arts education programs for elementary students. Starr led teams of residents to local schools, where they adorned the walls with reproductions of famous paintings and installed displays of block prints, needlework, weaving, and other textiles, which they called “Industrial Arts Cabinets.” Placing supposedly feminine craftworks alongside masculine-coded high art dismantled traditional hierarchies, showing students they could both appreciate the masters and become artists themselves by practicing a craft.
Less successful was Starr’s attempt to turn her own craft practice into a means of promoting the public good. Inspired by a visit to Morris’s Kelmscott Press, Starr took up a fifteen-month bookbinding apprenticeship in England in 1899. Upon returning to Chicago, she opened the Hull-House Bookbindery, which began as a private studio before hosting Saturday evening public workshops after two years. But these never grew into a larger educational program, and it’s not hard to see why. In the center of the rotunda, a neat stack of Starr’s handbound books sits inside a vitrine atop a heavy wooden table: poems by Sappho and Christina Rossetti, Addams’s Democracy and Social Ethics. Although they are elegant and speak to Hull-House’s commitment, remarkable for the time, to celebrating women artists and same-sex relationships, these luxurious books contradicted Hull House’s democratic mission. Addams’s egalitarian social theory, now put behind glass, had been made into a gilded object for the wealthy. As Starr herself later acknowledged in a quote printed on a nearby wall, “If I had thought it through, I would have realized that I would be using my hands to create books that only the rich could buy.”
Yet this realization became a kind of object lesson. As if offering a corrective to Starr’s luxury volumes, the curators have made the exhibition’s wall text available as hole-punched printouts that visitors can assemble into a booklet as they move through the galleries, finally putting the pages together with binding pins available at the exit. What’s more, they have published a rich exhibition catalog complete with three essays by Starr, available for the “solidarity price” of $18. The best of these short texts, “Art and Labor” (1895), identifies industrial capitalism’s ugliness as a symptom of workers’ alienation—not only from the value of their labor but also their innate artistic capacities. “We have thought,” Starr writes, “that artists and architects may keep the secrets, and the builders and makers, not knowing them, can slavishly and mechanically execute what the wise in these mysteries plan.” It is an anti-elitist, capaciously democratic argument against the disfiguring mystifications that turn labor into commodities and art into the purchase of a privileged few. In their place, Starr advocated for what Hull-House associate director Matthew Randle-Bent in an introduction to her essays calls “a mass politics of beauty,” arguing that “art can only come to a free people.” Since beauty is the result of work done freely, a truly beautiful society requires the liberation of the masses. A social settlement, Starr concludes, “must stand equally for both aims,” working “toward the rescue of those bound under the slavery of commerce” while “holding art and all good fruit of life to be the right of all.” Hull-House modeled this dual commitment, working to create a space for beauty and freedom through craftwork.
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Up the balustraded stairs, the second-story galleries document Hull-House’s most sustained and successful experiment in weaving Starr’s two aims together. At the turn of the century, neighborhood residents, especially immigrant women, led demonstrations, lectures, and manual training workshops sharing craft expertise from their places of birth through the Hull-House Labor Museum. This platform enabled artisans, like the Irish-born yarn spinner Mary Brosnahan and the Polish-born textile artist Hilda Satt Polacheck, to gain national renown. As migration patterns to the Near West Side shifted and national politicians stoked anti-immigrant furor, the Labor Museum adapted and dug in. In 1927, three years after the Johnson-Reed Act set restrictive immigration quotas, Hull-House Kilns opened to provide resources for recent Mexican immigrants to make ceramics and pottery. Around this time, Hull-House also opened a craftworks store on Michigan Avenue, Chicago’s premier retail strip.
Had I approached the exhibition on guard against craft’s reputation for quaint sentimentalism or escapist nostalgia, I would only have been more disarmed by the works’ stark grace. Even the doilies have a matter-of-factness that rewards close inspection with awe at their intricacy. Some pieces would be at home alongside High Modernist abstractions at the Art Institute. A matching placemat and table runner set with a muted pattern of checks and lines reminded me of Agnes Martin; a teardrop-shaped copper pitcher looks a bit like a Brancusi. Yet Radical Craft succeeds because it resists abstraction, especially regarding the political potential of art. It’s too grounded in the rich particulars of the institution, its people, and their city, just as the pieces are too singular, too genuinely themselves, to allow easy comparison. They have a quiet dignity that reflects the dignity of their making. It’s a quality I felt I could almost touch—and, when it comes to the ceramics, visitors are invited to. You won’t find that at the Art Institute.
Hull-House defies conventional museum definitions. Whereas traditional museums tend to privilege dead men and memorialize rich donors, their names carved gravely on the gallery walls—creating spaces more like mausoleums—the Labor Museum was and remains a living organism, an organization of people sharing their lives and work. All works of fine art have become abstract to the extent that they have been made into fungible commodities circulating in a global market driven by speculative finance and trite myths of artistic genius. The crafts at Hull-House represent artwork in its most concrete sense, even if most of the pieces are unattributed.
Just inside the entrance begins a single line of text that runs up the stairs, down the second-story hallway, and around the galleries on either side. It is a list of the names and craft specialties of just some of the more than ten thousand immigrant artisans who have passed through Hull-House. “Like the threads of a sample textile,” a block of wall text titled “A Note on Historical Absence” explains, “the names of these immigrant artisans point to the larger cloth.” I would add that, like the collaborative textile in the hallway, the absences form part of the texture, a sign of time’s erosion of human endeavor that makes the remaining strands more striking. As I returned to the exhibition, I noticed how the weaving had grown not just new strands but also new gaps. There’s no way to know who has added to the work: the point is to keep the collective effort going. On my last visit, as I left, I wove the loose end of a red thread between a few more strands of the warp.
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If Radical Craft earns its title, it’s because it is radical in the original sense of “going to the root,” “touching on what is fundamental.” The crafts made at the Labor Museum were occasions for their makers to share cultural practices from the places they had left, and at the same time to establish roots in their new city. These projects were truly experimental in that they responded to evolving conditions on the ground, testing the hypothesis that society could become freer and more artful through grassroots efforts.
At a time when national politics is dominated by division and plutocratic influence, Radical Craft makes a compelling case for local organizing. It offers a striking reminder that Chicago and the Midwest have long been places of leftist experimentation. Even as Hull-House gained international recognition, Addams, Starr, and fellow residents increasingly took to the streets, marching and agitating against child labor and for the eight-hour workday, protesting world war and advocating for women’s suffrage, standing in solidarity with unions and their demands. After getting arrested for protesting with waitstaff at Henrici’s Restaurant in the Loop, Starr was dubbed “Queen of the Strikers” by the Chicago Tribune. Two years later, she ran as a socialist candidate for alderperson of the Nineteenth Ward. Almost as soon as the FBI was founded in 1924, it started a file on Addams. That same decade, the Daughters of the American Revolution called her the “most dangerous woman in the United States.” What made Addams and Starr threatening to the combined interests of state power and capital was their radical conviction that beauty itself necessitated a society without divisions and hierarchies.
Though Addams, Starr, and much of their physical settlement are gone, their so-called dangerous ideas live on in contemporary Chicago. The artist Theaster Gates, who has cited Addams as an influence, runs a spiritual successor to Hull-House in the Dorchester Art and Housing Collaborative on the South Side. The museum recognizes other spiritual successors by collaborating with them on Radical Craft’s generous offering of public programming. Workshops are conducted in collaboration with Red Line Service, a collective of artists with experience of houselessness focused on expanding art access in Chicago, and with Firebird Community Arts, a ceramics and glassblowing studio that, in the spirit of Addams and Starr, moved to East Garfield Park in 2018 to be among the communities it serves. The WasteShed, a nonprofit focused on creative reuse, hosts recurring “Radical Mending” studios. The Weaving Mill, a textile studio that runs an education program for adults with developmental disabilities, is leading events on the history of textiles made at Hull-House.
In one ongoing demonstration, Weaving Mill co-founder Emily Winter is continuing a work that at some point in Hull-House history was left unfinished on a loom.
Jason de Stefano
Jason de Stefano teaches at The University of Chicago, where he is a Harper-Schmidt Fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts.