The Jane Addams Hull-House Museum presents Read/Write Library, a pop-up collection of books, comics, journals, zines, and other creative material that celebrates communities across the Chicago area. We invite visitors of all ages to explore the library’s unique collection and consider how work typically left out of libraries and museums can inform our understanding of local history. Come visit Read/Write Library at the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum with stories about your own neighborhood! 

Radical Craft will explore the history and legacy of arts education at the country’s most influential social settlement. Through exemplary paintings, textiles, metalwork, pottery, and books—largely from Hull-House’s own collection—the exhibition will show how the arts at Hull-House provided immigrant neighbors with opportunities to experience the “restorative power in the exercise of a genuine craft,” in the words of Hull-House co-founder Jane Addams (1860-1935). Radical Craft will give attention to Hull-House’s lesser-known co-founder, Ellen Gates Starr (1859-1940), who was committed to the ideals of the Arts and Crafts movement and believed that art should be accessible to everyone. The exhibition will also pay homage to the significance of unnamed artisans by displaying unattributed work alongside the settlement’s more well-known figures.  

Accompanied by a catalogue and a year-long series of craft workshops Radical Craft is part of Art Design Chicago, a citywide collaboration initiated by the Terra Foundation for American Art that highlights the city’s artistic heritage and creative communities.