About the Exhibition

Jane Addams Hull-House Museum worked with internationally renowned artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña in 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 that is 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 residency at JAHHM, in partnership with Public Media Institute, includes 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), a virtual workshop 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.

For Gómez-Peña’s Casa Museo: A Living Museum and Archive (September 9, 2021—May 29, 2022), pioneering conceptual-performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña (Mexican-American, b. Mexico City, 1955), took up residence in Jane Addams Hull House Museum. The exhibition layers one house museum on top of two others, in San Francisco and Mexico City, highlighting the many affinities between the ideologies pursued by Gómez-Peña, Addams, and Hull-House. 

Through sound and image, Gómez-Peña and his ever-evolving performance troupe, La Pocha Nostra, inhabits Jane Addams’s office, the original Hull-House library, Jane Addams’s bedroom, and other spaces throughout the Hull home. During its 75-year history, Hull-House Settlement was home to nearly one hundred Residents—advocates, doctors, scientists, writers, and artists—who lived on the upper floors of the settlement. The Residents and their immigrant and migrant neighbors worked toward, what Jane Addams called, “the common good.” In residency at Hull-House, Gómez-Peña and La Pocha Nostra, present a borderless world where geographic, municipal, gender and other borders are dismantled to allow public institutions to reflect and serve all publics. Gómez-Peña’s Casa Museo: A Living Museum and Archive was devised with Gómez-Peña in dialogue with his performance troupe La Pocha Nostra (US/Mexico 2021).