About the Exhibition

This fall, Jane Addams Hull-House Museum opens Claiming Space: Creative Grounds and Freedom Summer School, a collaborative exhibition with artists, educators and students that explored the transformation of public school space amidst the backdrop of depopulation, divestment and school closures on Chicago’s West Side.

In 2013, the City of Chicago closed and consolidated 49 Chicago Public Schools (CPS). More than 3 million square feet of public school space became designated as “under-utilized” or “under-performing” and was turned back over to the City of Chicago for resale or repurposing. Hull-House Museum partners with Creative Grounds, led by architectural urban designer, Paola Aguirre and artist Sara Pooley, to document and make visible the statuses of closed, sold, non-utilized and merged West Side Chicago Public Schools. Through an interactive mapping installation, Creative Grounds visualizes the impacted landscape and the affected communities, contemplates their enormity and reflects on possibilities for the future.

 

Jane Addams Hull-House Museum also partners with educator and Austin resident, Danton Floyd, founder of 360 Nation, a community organization that runs Freedom Summer School based out of Charles Sumner Math & Science Academy. In 2013, the City of Chicago designated Charles Sumner Academy, located between the North Lawndale and West Garfield Park neighborhoods, as an “under-utilized” school. Sumner was spared closure and remains a growing, high-performing school, a beacon institution in the community, but three schools in close proximity were shuttered or consolidated.

360 Nation Freedom Summer School students spent the summer learning how to identify and transform neglected spaces into welcoming environments, where they could better see and express themselves through a lens of self-determination. They cleared and configured empty lots around Charles Sumner Academy into viable play spaces with found and discarded materials. This fall, Hull-House commissioned teaching artist Leah Gipson, who is the founder of West Side Art Chicago, to work with Floyd and 360 Nation students over six weeks to create new designs, from the organization’s existing motifs, into dynamic patterned wallpaper. Hull-House is also partnered with Alexandria Eregbu, a West Side based artist and designer, to further interpret the designs by 360 Nation students into logo graphics that communicate key values related to the exhibition and the student’s experience. 

For a companion exhibition, Hull-House is partnered with artist and activist Nicole Marroquin who uses art, archives, and living testimonies to make connections between youth-led political movements and spatial justice. Her collaged screen prints chronicle the high school walkouts organized by Black and Latinx students in Pilsen and Little Village neighborhoods between 1968-1973. At the time, students advocated for themselves, agitated and were brutally confronted by Chicago police. Marroquin’s work reflects on the claimed spaces and experiences of student activism.

 

Featured Artists and Educators

Paola Aguirre and Sara Pooley are collaborative partners on Creative Grounds, led by Aguirre‘s Borderless Studios and supported by Archeworks. Creative Grounds explores the community and urban role of school grounds after the largest Chicago Public Schools’ closures in history. In collaboration with community organizations, educators, architects and journalists, this research and creative initiative will collect ideas and document the process of repurposing schools focused on leveraging the legacy of their past. Support for the Creative Grounds installation at Hull-House is supported by a Chicago Architecture Biennial Connector Grant.

Alexandria Eregbu is a conceptual artist whose concerns frequently address visibility, ontology, family, locality and mobility. She was a recipient of the Propeller Fund Grant in 2013. She received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Danton Floyd is the founder and lead organizer of 360 Nation. He has worked in community spaces, behavioral health institutions and primary school settings. Floyd utilizes popular education and critical dialogue as a means to promote self-love. He received his master’s degree from University of Illinois at Chicago in Educational Psychology. 360 Nation is a community organization based out of the West Side of Chicago that utilizes relationship building and the gifts and talents of 10-12 year olds to promote self-determination in the black community through in-school engagements and a summer camp program.

Leah Gipson is a artist who uses her professional experiences as a healthcare and human services provider to develop counter-public projects that address gender, racial and economic systems of inequality in Chicago’s West Side neighborhoods. In 2013, she initiated West Side Art Chicago, a series of collaborative participatory projects that focus on raising community consciousness and funding for local artists.

Nicole Marroquin is a transdisciplinary artist, strategist, researcher, concerned parent, and faculty in the Department of Art Education at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.  In 2015, Marroquin was invited to present research at the University of Chicago in conjunction with the exhibit The City Lost and Found: Capturing New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, 1960–1980 and at the Art Institute of Chicago for the symposium The Wall of Respect and People’s Art Since 1967. Recently, she was a Joan Mitchell Fellow at the Center for Racial Justice Innovation, a Propeller Fund awardee and Artist In-Residence at Mana Contemporary with the collective Multiuso.