Radical Craft: Arts Education at Hull-House, 1889-1935 (September 6, 2024, to July 27, 2025, ), an exhibition, catalog, and series of craft workshops, will explore the history and legacy of arts education at the country’s most influential social settlement. The exhibition will be held at the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum (JAHHM) on the campus of the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) from in collaboration with the exhibition “Learning Together” at UIC’s Gallery 400.

Radical Craft will illuminate a network of local beginnings and international influences upon Hull-House’s approach to the practice and experience of art. By the turn of the century, Hull-House had become a nexus for educators who envisioned the arts as a tool for social reform in the immigrant communities on the Near West Side. 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. Notably, the exhibition also sheds new light on immigrant artists who came to Hull-House for art classes and demonstrated their heritage crafts. “Radical Craft” will also acknowledge when experiments in art education failed, offering visitors an opportunity to think about the capacity of the arts to effect social change today. 

Radical Craft will extend Hull-House’s history of committing to access to the arts for all communities. Hull-House will host “hands-on” workshops in ceramics and textiles in the historic Residents’ Dining Hall. We will partner with Redlines 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. The workshops with shared meals will take place in Fall 2024 and Spring 2025.

Radical Craft and its companion exhibition, Learning Together: Art, Education, Community at UIC’s Gallery 400, are funded by the Terra Foundation for American Art as part of ART DESIGN CHICAGO, a citywide collaboration that highlights the city’s artistic heritage and creative communities.