About the Book

The country’s most important social settlement, Hull-House was a nexus for educators who envisioned the arts as a tool for social reform. Radical Craft celebrates the work of these immigrant artists and reformers while illuminating the local beginnings and international influences upon Hull-House’s approach to the practice and experience of art. Painting, textiles, metalwork, pottery, and bookmaking provided immigrant neighbors with opportunities to experience what Jane Addams called, “restorative power in the exercise of a genuine craft.” Radical Craft also looks at Ellen Gates Starr, Hull-House’s lesser-known cofounder. Starr was committed to the ideals of the Arts and Crafts movement and believed that art should be accessible to everyone.

Contributors: Katie Akerboom, Nadia Maragha, Fiona Maxwell, Liesl Olson, Matthew Randle-Bent, Nadia Maragha, Ellen Gates Starr; Annie V.F. Storr, plus an interview with artist Faheem Majeed by Ross Jordan.

Table of Contents

Annie V.F. Storr
The Cause of Art Is the Cause of the People: Ellen Gates Starr and the Radical Legacy of Art Education at Hull-House

Liesl Olson
Alice Kellogg Tyler and the Mothers of Hull-House

Fiona Maxwell
The Old and the New: Immigrant Women and Intergenerational Connection at the Hull-House Labor Museum

Matthew Randle-Bent
Romantic Radicalism: Three Texts by Ellen Gates Starr

Ellen Gates Starr
Art and Labor (1895)
Hull-House Bookbindery (1900)
Why I Am a Socialist (1917)

Faheem Majeed & Ross Stanton Jordan
Here Is a Set of Keys

Nadia Maragha
Chicago’s Sculptor: Jésus Torres and Mexican Art at Hull-House

Katie Akerboom
The Long Endeavor: The Early Fight Against Fast Fashion at the Hull-House Settlement

The Weaving Mill / Jane Addams Hull-House Museum collaboration

To celebrate the release of the museum’s first book, the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum collaborated with The Weaving Mill and HOUR Studio on the production of a limited edition version of the Radical Craft catalogue.

This unique woven book wrap, produced in an edition of 50, featured a quote from Arts & Crafts visionary and co-founder of Hull-House, Ellen Gates Starr: “I began to feel that instead of talking it would be a great deal better to make something myself, ever so little, thoroughly well, and beautiful of its kind.”

In addition to the limited edition catalogue, The Weaving Mill also produced a run of ten blankets bearing the same quote from Starr’s “Hull-House Bookbindery,” (1900), which was reprinted in the Radical Craft catalogue.