About the Exhibition

Fifty years after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination sparked outrage on Chicago’s West Side, Jane Addams Hull-House Museum revisited artists at the center of neighborhood change. The Best Side: The Art and Soul of Jackie Hetherington, featured works of a local, West Side artist who—just seven months after the 1968 uprising—co-founded Art and Soul, a unique neighborhood center located in two storefronts at 3742 West 16th Street in the North Lawndale neighborhood. An innovative collaboration between communities and museums, Art and Soul was one of a number of initiatives created by the Conservative Vice Lords, Inc., an organization that promoted self-determination on the city’s West Side. 
 
The Best Side presented woodblock prints the artist created in Chicago in the 1980s depicting scenes from Chicago’s West Side. The show revealed an important lost chapter in the artistic history of Chicago and the West Side—one that pushed against the prevailing narrative of the West Side and seeks to underscore the mantra that has been uttered for decades by residents of the community: The West Side is the best side.”