Weaving Women, Art, and Justice

Keeping the "Broad Spirit Awake" at Chicago's Hull-House

Greetings!

I’m writing this from “it’s 43 but feels like 29 degrees” Chicago. Yesterday, there was snow, hail, rain, wind (so much wind!), and a double rainbow in the span of 3 hours. I love the chaos of a good storm with the scattered leaves and clouds racing through the sky.

Cold weather means hats, and scarves, and good socks. In honor of the labor of everyone involved in making these warm gifts for us, I decided to dedicate this Deep Dive to weavers. This is part 2 of a 4 part series on Hull-House. Last week, we talked about Jane Addams and part of her legacy. This week, we’ll explore the role that art and craft played in the Hull-House community.

Bookbinding and Education

One of the first things you’ll notice when you arrive at the Hull-House Museum is the invitation to bind your own book. There are pages throughout the museum to collect and brads to bind the book when you’re done. It’s not only charming and sends you off with a lovely and educational memento, but it harkens back to one of the many programs that Hull House provided.

Ellen Gates Starr, one of the founders of Hull-House, started a bookbindery that was initially private and went on to be an evening class. While she found it soothing to engage in bookbinding, especially during the time of loss during the First World War, she soon realized that this practice did very little to change social conditions or to improve the lives of the poor. She acknowledged that both the price of the materials and the time needed were more than most people could afford. I appreciate that level of awareness and her willingness to shift focus.

In 1894, she founded The Chicago Public School Arts Society, a program that placed art in the city’s public school to educate and inspire children. She hoped that the program would offer an experience of beauty not regularly found in the industrial neighborhoods in Chicago. They lent reproductions of fine art to local schools and the program and the art kept expanding. In addition to the art, they also installed “Industrial Arts Cabinets” filled with needlework, weaving, block prints, and other textiles in the schools.

It’s clear to me from my short time here that the seeds she and the Society planted live on. Chicago is steeped in art and beauty!

Alice Kellogg Tyler

“I have rather a weakness for mothers and children.” ~Alice Kellogg Tyler, 1888

When I read those words on the wall, I cried. It was some kind of cry that was both grief and joy. It was like a good friend reaching across the table to touch your arm and say, “I see you. I love you.” In my 28 years of being a mother, I’ve met very few people who seem genuinely fond of mothers. Reading that altered me in the best possible way. I want to keep working to build a world where my daughter and others will be venerated as a mother.

Alice Kellogg Tyler’s best-known painting, The Mother, depicts a seated woman and her baby. Delightfully, this painting that was accepted for exhibition in New York by the Society of American Artists in 1891—a rare honor for a Midwestern artist—has a permanent home at The Hull-House Museum. I’ve shown it below for you although, due to the lighting, it was a hard to photograph.

During her time with Hull-House, she taught art classes, contributed to exhibitions at the Butler Art Gallery, and painted key portraits of Hull House women. She was trained in Paris and at the Art Institute of Chicago and produced beautiful work. She’s not better known because she died prematurely at the age of 37 but her legacy lives on. In Jane Addams eulogy for the artist, she described the “message” of Kellogg Tyler’s work:

“Her pictures hang upon the various walls of Hull-House; they attract by a rare quality of beauty and power but always give out clearly this message: Do not consent that life shall become dreary and commonplace; insist upon distilling the best from it; keep the spirit broad awake.”

Art for Everyone

The women who founded Hull-House challenged the idea that fine art was reserved for the privileged. When the artist and educator Enella Benedict started teaching classes at Hull-House, she began showing her students’ work at the Butler Art Gallery rather than exhibiting valuable works loaned by members of Chicago’s elite.

The Butler Art Gallery was the first addition to the Hull-House settlement and was a multi-purpose art gallery. It featured a reading room, which was also a branch of the Chicago Public Library as well as an art studio and a large lecture room. It was free and open to the public. The museum still is. Imagine a world where museums are free for everyone! How would that change our society?

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Weaving Social Justice

As the rain pounded outside, we made our way up the steep staircase and were greeted with a delightfully colorful loom! My daughter, Alexandra, pictured below, immediately sat down and started weaving.

She made it all the way across the loom. Due to nerve damage in my hand, I wasn’t quite able to make it that far but doing it gave me a deep appreciation of the skill, dexterity, and time required! It’s so easy to take these things for granted until you try your hand at them. That’s true for the various forms of (often unseen) labor that mothers give not only to their families but to society as well.

Something I truly appreciate about Jane Addams and Hull-House is that they did see. They didn’t just educate but celebrated the various forms of labor and craft in the people that made their way to Chicago and Hull-House. They wove social justice, humanitarian causes, art, and education into everything they did. They supported women and worked to build a better society and I’m deeply inspired by them.

During my time in Graduate school at Antioch University Seattle, I coordinated the Women’s Education Program and did outreach at various women’s shelters around the city. Creating art and leading writing workshops with the women was a tremendous gift to me. There’s something so beautiful about offering food, education, and community space for free when we can. I see how the founders of Hull-House created such a rich tapestry into American society. I am blessed to have been able to feel the energy of that in this exhibit.

The Radical Craft: Arts Education at Hull-House 1889-1935 exhibit is currently available for viewing and offers participatory art projects. Go see it if you can!

We have two more weeks in this series on Hull-House.

Next up: The Labor Museum

I hope you’ll join me.

I would love to hear what you think or what the weather is like where you are.

Here are two questions to get started:

Where do you see the arts and social justice or reform in the world around you?

What keeps your “broad spirit awake”?

Please drop links if you have some!

Thanks for being here.

All my love,

Kymberlee

PS, Here’s the double rainbow!