On the last weekend of July, guests from the United Kingdom arrived in Chicago airports as Chicago teachers were gearing up for a three-day gathering with like-minded educators. On August 1st, Jane Addams Hull-House Museum kicked off a pilot educator institute, “Learning Together” in collaboration with UIC’s Gallery 400. JAHHM and Gallery 400 united Chicago educators, art historians, and cultural workers visiting from UK heritage partner institutions that share historical links and values with Hull-House Settlement. 

On the first day of the convening, Terra Foundation for American Art Research Fellow Annie Storr presented the history of arts education through the biography of Hull-House co-founder Ellen Gates Starr. In her lecture, Storr connected the arts at Hull-House to the rise of progressive education in Chicago and trans-Atlantic partnerships. Guests from the United Kingdom- Murdo Macdonald, a Patrick Geddes scholar, Fahra Bi of Toynbee Hall, and Andrew Vaughan of The Whitworth- presented historical connections to Hull-House and Chicago and shared innovative arts and community practices happening in their locations. Chicago-based arts educators reflected on the challenges and successes of the last year of teaching during a global pandemic. 

During a tour of Hull-House Museum, participants saw rarely exhibited paintings by Enella Benedict, Hull-House’s first art school director, and artifacts from the Labor Museum, a community museum and arts education initiative at Hull-House. 

Arts educators and scholars also participated in hands-on arts education workshops.  Experiences included a painting workshop with transdisciplinary artist and educator Victoria Martinez, listening and reflective sessions with Gallery 400’s growing arts education oral history archive, and a rhizome graphic printmaking activity led by Jorge Lucero and William Estrada, two practicing Chicago artists and arts educators. These presentations and art sessions deepened existing relationships among Chicago-based arts educators and created new connections with United Kingdom based cultural institutions. 

Visiting Hull-House heritage partners were provided access to Chicago-based projects that are on the leading edge of community arts practice and draw parallels to the Social Settlement Movement. These included Jim Duignan’s Stockyard Institute, a decades-long effort to provide radical creative access to youth otherwise marginalized by traditional education; Anthony Overton High School, a shuttered Chicago Public School turned community arts engagement space by Borderless Studios and Creative Grounds; the National Museum of Mexican Art, and the Hyde Park Art Center.

Who are Hull-House heritage partners and histories? 

Toynbee Hall, which was the origin site of the Settlement House Movement and directly inspired the founding of Hull-House. Today, Toynbee Hall is reinforcing its engagement with its own heritage, but unlike JAHHM, it has maintained an unbroken thriving social service effort.

Patrick Geddes, who, in the late 1880’s, founded university halls for students and ran summer schools which, unheard of at the time, were open to the people from diverse backgrounds. The Patrick Geddes Centre aims to revive awareness and build expertise around the ideas, actions, and impact of Geddes. Today, the Centre offers rich and varied programming of learning activities to connect with people of different ages and backgrounds.

Manchester Gallery is the original open- public, municipal museum, initiated in 1823 by artists, as an educational institution to ensure that the city and all its people grow with creativity, imagination, health and productivity.

The Whitworth was founded in 1889 as the first English gallery in a park. As part of the University of Manchester, the Whitworth is a gallery that is a place of research and academic collaboration, and whose education and learning teams have generated new approaches to working with non-traditional audiences.

"Learning Together: Art, Education and Community" is part of Art Design Chicago, an initiative of the Terra Foundation for American Art exploring and elevating Chicago’s rich art and design histories and diverse creative communities. "Learning Together: Art, Education and Community" is funded by the Terra Foundation for American Art.