JAHHM Looks Back on 2022

As 2022 comes to a close, the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum celebrates its first full year open to the public since 2020!

This year, Hull-House Educators led almost 50 guided tours for nearly 1,000 tour participants. One-third of these tours were conducted virtually for groups across the United States (and some in other countries!). We also welcomed another nearly 1,000 guests in dozens of self-guided group visits and field trips from different universities, schools, and organizations. A proud member of the University of Illinois Chicago community, Jane Addams Hull-House Museum led half of those tours for groups of UIC students and professionals.

Through our online and virtual content, we reached hundreds of thousands across the world, sharing Hull-House history in engaging and dynamic ways. Thousands of guests came through Hull-House’s doors - guests from Hawai’i to Maine, and from countries as widespread as Brazil, Denmark, the United Kingdom, Japan, Mexico, and Norway!

2022
Programs and Partnerships

This year saw the return of JAHHM’s in-person events for the first time since 2020, alongside continuing virtual programs and workshops. We held nearly 20 events, many in collaboration with the Chicago Public Library, the Chicago Architecture Center, the Jane Addams Peace Association, and UIC’s Gallery 400. These programs included:

-Virtual arts education workshops with Chicago Public Library staff

-In-person protest banner art workshops at the Harold Washington Library Center

-A virtual presentation of the Jane Addams Book Awards for children’s literature

-A summer session of the Chicago Architecture Center’s Girls Build! program

-An in-person open house to celebrate Jane Addams’ birthday and the opening of our fall exhibition, The Benedict Gallery: Revisiting Hull-House’s Arts Educators

-An in-person summer institute for Chicago arts educators and arts education historians from the UK as part of our wider “Learning Together: Art, Education, and Community” Initiative

-The Haunting of Hull-House, our first October event series highlighting Hull-House’s history of folklore and urban legends, which included ghost tours, screenings, a Halloween family event, and a live broadcast of WBEZ’s Reset on the Road with Sasha-Ann Simons

It was a delight to be able to connect with Chicago communities in such diverse ways and engage with the 1,000+ visitors who attended these programs. A huge thank you to all of our partners, collaborators, and the guests who came out to join us for these experiences!

2022 Exhibitions

This year, JAHHM also supported the extension of Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s artist residency at JAHHM, in partnership with the Public Media Institute, The Smart Museum, and the MacArthur Foundation. This partnership included the exhibition Gómez-Peña’s Casa Museo: A Living Museum and Archive (September 9, 2021—August 19, 2022), the experimental radio broadcast “Gómez-Peña’s Mex Files: Audio Art & Strange Poetry from the US/Mexico Border” (1985–2021), virtual workshops with Gómez-Peña’s performance troupe La Pocha Nostra, a film screening, a museum takeover, and the artist’s first in-person performance since the pandemic lockdown began in March 2020.

JAHHM hosted this exhibition in participation with Toward Common Cause: Art, Social Change, and the MacArthur Fellows Program at 40, a multi-venue exhibition and program series featuring twenty-eight MacArthur Fellows happening throughout 2021, organized by the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago and supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

GÓMEZ-PEÑA’S CASA MUSEO 

This September, JAHHM opened a special limited gallery exhibition of landscape works by Enella Benedict, the founder of the Hull-House Arts School. The Benedict Gallery: Revisiting Hull-House’s Arts Educators is a continuation of the Museum’s effort into exploring art education roots in Chicago. On view are Benedict’s oil paintings and watercolors that have not been publicly exhibited since 1938.

THE BENEDICT GALLERY 

Museum Blog:
From the Desk of Jane Addams

This year we also launched the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum blog, From the Desk of Jane Addams. Among its entries, you can find articles highlighting programs here at the museum. You can also find biographies of many of Hull-House’s most iconic Residents and collections of education and research resources and links.

Here are a few to get you started:

“Who was Ellen Gates Starr?”

“Jane Addams & Mary Rozet Smith: More Than Gal Pals”

“Who was Enella Benedict?”

“"Finding Folklore": Jane Addams and Hull-House's Supernatural History”

THU, DEC 22

Who Was Harriet Rice?

Our newest post details the life of Dr. Harriet Rice, accomplished physician and the first Black resident of Hull-House.

Read More 

A Look Ahead at 2023…

2023 promises to be a year of continued community connection, celebrations of women’s history, examinations of the history of arts education, and sharing stories of the neighborhood and people around the Hull-House Settlement. Be on the lookout for public program series that will be taking place in March and October of 2023. March’s events will center around women’s history in honor of Women’s History Month, and October will bring around the return of our wildly popular Haunting of Hull-House event series, complete with ghost tours and other public programs!

The UIC Gender and Women’s Studies department is celebrating its 50th anniversary and will be holding a public event in March 2023 to commemorate its history and achievements:

“UIC’s Gender & Women’s Studies Program is celebrating our 50th anniversary! Join us on Thursday, March 9, 2023, for a daylong celebration featuring intergenerational dialogues among GWS students, alum, and faculty; space for community gathering and conversation; art making; and documentation. We are thrilled to host this celebration at Hull-House, in recognition of our shared history and ongoing work together. Hull-House tours will be available over lunch. We’ll close out the day with birthday cake and a toast to GWS!

“Further details and registration information is forthcoming. For now, please save the date! This event will be fully hybrid. We hope you can join us in person or via Zoom to honor all GWS has accomplished, celebrate our GWS community, and commit to the ongoing project of imagining and creating a liberatory feminist future.”

Find out more about the program and the people who are taking part in furthering the work of this vital field at the link below!

Learn about GWS at UIC

Also in March 2023, the John Dewey Society will be holding part of their 2023 conference at JAHHM. The Society’s mission is to “foster intelligent inquiry into problems pertaining to the place and function of education in social change, and to share, discuss, and disseminate the results of such studies.” The theme of this year’s conference is “The Arts as a Site of Social Reconstruction” and will put a special focus on Jane Addams’ belief that the arts can create pathways and bridges between different communities and generations, and allow for community growth and social reform. Learn more about the conference below:

Learn about JDW 2023 Conference

Finally, throughout October 2023, we plan to continue our tradition of highlighting and celebrating Hull-House’s background of supernatural happenings and urban legends. During this year’s series, “The Haunting of Hull-House”, we conducted weekly (sold out!) ghost tours that went in-depth to share these stories and reports and center them within the historical, sociological, and cultural environment of their time. We plan to conduct these tours again, as well as hold public events and gatherings at the museum to celebrate the site’s paranormal history. Join us for a spooky good time!