CHICAGO — Who is art really for? That’s the unspoken question at the heart of two inspiring exhibitions, each focused on the radical social and political possibilities of progressive art education in Chicago. As art continues its ascent as a luxury item and investment property, as annual tuition at private art colleges reaches the $50,000 mark, as museum admission tops 30 bucks for an adult ticket, it might seem like art is only for a rich and privileged elite.
That’s dead wrong. Art is for everyone, and the best way for it to get there is through the kind of pedagogical experiments that have taken place since 1889 in Chicago. That was the year that Jane Addams, Ellen Gates Starr, and Mary Keyser moved into a stately residence on the Near West Side to open a settlement house. At the time, Chicago was the fastest growing city in the world and this neighborhood was home to thousands of recently arrived immigrants from Europe. Crowded tenements, long hours laboring in factories, and civic neglect were the norm. Hull-House aimed to change this. To that end the settlement eventually expanded to encompass 13 buildings, including a kindergarten, public kitchen, employment bureau, and library — but its very first addition was a multipurpose art gallery, where exhibitions and studio lessons were free to all. Art was understood to be as crucial to social reform as the more practical services on offer, and tens of thousands of individuals of all ages and backgrounds participated in arts programming at Hull-House until its closure in 1963.
Radical Craft: Arts Education at Hull-House, 1889-1935 tells this story in exhibits mounted throughout the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum, located in the two buildings that remained after the settlement was bulldozed to construct the University of Illinois’ Chicago campus. It’s a properly historical show, with lots of archival imagery and didactics, pamphlet versions of which can be collected into a neat booklet by visitors — a nod to the bookbindery that Starr, herself a master binder, opened at Hull-House in 1899. A few examples of her handiwork are on view, including a volume by Sappho, subtly acknowledging the same-sex relationships of herself, Addams, and other residents. Most exciting are the beautifully arranged displays of textiles made at the settlement’s Labor Museum, which was not actually a museum but rather an early experiment in arts ed where immigrant weavers — and later metalworkers, pasta makers, and woodturners — demonstrated their traditional expertise at the moment of its supplanting by industry. Shelves of colorful ceramics made at the Hull-House Kilns indicate a similar shift: the kilns had been established as a commercial venture through which artisans, especially those who arrived in the wake of the Mexican Revolution, could earn a living from their craftwork, but this became less viable with the invention of mass-produced Fiesta dinnerware in 1936.
Art making and exhibiting belonged at the Hull-House settlement because its founders believed that art was a fundamental aspect of being human, and therefore a real need of the immigrant, working-class families whose humanity they existed to serve. The other great need, then as now, is for the children of under-resourced city neighborhoods to be emboldened and enriched by all that art has to offer. How that happens is the subject of Learning Together: Art Education and Community at Gallery 400, which surveys the progressive art pedagogy of a diverse group of Chicago educators from the mid-1960s through the 2010s.
Learning Together considers a range of possibilities for the conjunction of art and education: murals on school buildings, artwork in school hallways, art made collaboratively with students, as well as the endless ways art can be taught to kids or used to teach other subjects. Much of what’s exhibited are programs that exist beyond the Chicago Public Schools system, which laid off nearly all its art teachers during its 1970s budget crisis. Outside organizations, from grassroots to big-budget philanthropies, stepped in and never left.
Historical touchstones include Hull-House’s Starr, who in 1894 initiated a group that placed artworks in classrooms and organized museum visits for students in disadvantaged schools. The legendary Dr. Margaret Burroughs is represented for her establishment of the South Side Community Art Center and DuSable Museum, two of the most storied African American art institutions in the country. As seen in a trio of recent photographs, Dr. Burroughs’s linocuts of uplifting multiracial scenes still grace the walls of local public schools, including the one where she taught for over 20 years.
If mounting art in schools seems less than edgy now, it was plenty radical then, and Learning Together offers a first-rate update on the strategy, courtesy of Arthur Dixon Elementary School. More than 200 Afrocentric sculptures, artifacts, and paintings currently decorate its South Side halls; students act as docents for the collection. Like the Hull-House Labor Museum, knowledge and pride exude from such endeavors, even heartbreaking ones: in 2000, students at Jenner Elementary gave tours of the “Memory Museum” they’d scavenged and installed in an empty classroom in their soon-to-be-demolished school — part of the Cabrini-Green public housing complex — guided by art teacher Mathias Schergen. Learning Together includes a shadow box of the remains.
Collaborations between artists and students abound, many of them spearheaded by Chicago Public Art Group. CPAG was founded in 1972 by two of the city’s foremost public artists, John Pitman Weber and William Walker, great believers in community representation through mural-making. But the GOAT collaboration has got to be one from 1989 between 500 highschoolers and Keith Haring, who painted a 480-foot mural together in downtown Chicago’s Grant Park at the behest of Irving Zucker, a CPS English teacher who had long integrated jazz and other arts into his classes. Yes, that really happened. A few years later, the mural panels ended up some blocks away, where an empty lot was temporarily tented and converted into Gallery 37, a paid summer arts program for teens. Now called After School Matters, it offers over 24,000 opportunities at 338 sites across the city annually.
There’s loads else here, too. The commercial approach of Little Black Pearl, in Bronzeville, is snazzily demonstrated by a pair of limited edition Air Jordans, decorated with kids’ drawings and released in partnership with Nike. The wacky teen program Yollocalli Arts Reach, run by the National Museum of Mexican Art, gets a nod, as does Pilsen’s Pros Arts Studio, which since 1977 has been offering free puppet workshops, circuses, and a hilarious made-by-children TV series, often featuring potatoes.
Making brilliant artworks isn’t really the point of any of this, but Spiral Workshops — an experimental curriculum initiative run by Olivia Gude and her UIC grad students for nearly 20 years — produced at least one. In a Jenny Holzer-inspired project, teens wrote texts they felt were invisibly branded on their bodies, then made them visible in projections. One girl had herself photographed with the following printed across her face and torso: “NO I WASN’T ASKING FOR IT.” It takes an extraordinary amount of self-knowledge, bravery, and creativity to do that. Which is to say, it takes some very fine art education.
Radical Craft: Arts Education at Hull-House, 1889-1935 continues at the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum (800 South Halsted Street, Chicago, Illinois) through July 27, 2025. The exhibition was curated by Ross Jordan.
Learning Together: Art Education and Community continues at Gallery 400 (400 South Peoria Street, Chicago, Illinois) through December 14. The exhibition was curated by Inés Arango-Guingue, Denny Mwaura, and Lorelei Stewart.
Both exhibitions are organized as part of Art Design Chicago.
