About the Exhibition

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. What can we learn about our city from forty-year-old West Side community newspapers, books by youth poets, photography by South Side immigrants, and journalism by people who are currently and formerly incarcerated? Visitors are encouraged to contribute their own work to the library, helping to rewrite the narratives of Chicago from the ground up.

Read/Write Library extends the history of the Hull-House settlement, where Chicago’s first public art gallery opened in 1891 with a branch of the Chicago Public Library on its ground floor. Hull-House’s free gallery hosted exhibitions featuring immigrant artists. Later, Hull-House published neighborhood magazines and newsletters created and edited by neighbors. In a spirit of radical democracy, Hull-House continues to create spaces that strengthened a sense of community in the settlement’s immigrant neighborhood.