Chicago's Sculptor: Jesús Torres and Mexican Art at Hull-House
By Nadia Maragha
This essay was originally published in the exhibition catalog for the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum’s 2024-2025 exhibition Radical Craft: Arts Education at Hull-House, 1899-1935.
Among the burial sites of significant Chicagoans at Graceland Cemetery—those of the architects Daniel Burnham and Louis Sullivan and the industrialist George Pullman—is the grave of Jesús Torres. Though his name is not well known, Torres was a popular and important figure in the Chicago arts community during the 1930s and 1940s. He was self-taught and never received formal training, having discovered his talents in classes held at the Hull-House settlement. His style and pieces gained acclaim throughout the city, both for the beauty of his work and because of his identity as a Mexican artist.
At the turn of the twentieth century, both Mexico and the United States were determined to raise their international standing and encourage investment in their growth. They both expanded their railroad networks, focused on the increase of domestic agriculture, and placed a heavy emphasis on industrialization. In 1910, at the start of the Mexican Revolution, many Mexicans made the choice to migrate into the United States, predominantly to Texas.
Torres was born in 1898, in Silao, in Mexico’s Guanajuato state, a center of trade and travel crisscrossed with busy rail lines. Silao is in the Bajío region of Mexico, a major agricultural hub. Through young adulthood, Torres lived in Silao, where he married María Francisca Araujo (1903–94) and worked as a farm laborer. Torres’s work in the arts later in life was most likely influenced by the artisans and craftsmen for which Silao was famous—a group that included his own father, who had been a shoemaker and leatherworker.
By the 1920s, employment opportunities had become more readily available to Mexicans in the United States. Agricultural employers needed seasonal workers, which created a demand that was met by Mexican immigrants. Jesús and Francisca Torres were part of this wave of northern migration; they arrived in Texas in 1924. These workers moved often, following seasonal crops and settling for short periods in the areas where they worked. Once they reached Texas, Jesús and Francisca lived near relatives.
Like many other Mexican migrants during that time, they moved north in search of better employment. They may have worked in Oklahoma. In Saint Paul, Minnesota, they worked in the booming sugar beet industry. By 1926, they had made their way to Chicago in search of industrial work, which was said to be significantly more lucrative. They initially settled near the city’s stockyards, but eventually they moved to the Near West Side.
In the late 1920s, the Hull-House settlement offered programs, including English classes, designed to provide community members with skills that would broaden the opportunities available to them. Torres attended language classes and enrolled in a ceramics program taught by Morris Topchevsky. Topchevsky (1899–1947), an immigrant himself, was a Russian Jewish artist who had studied and taught at Hull-House and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He was an important member of the community of Chicago artists devoted to creating works based in revolutionary Mexican art styles and became well acquainted with Diego Rivera while studying art in Mexico.
As the scholar Sarah Kelly Oehler explains, many “progressive, socially concerned artists” around the United States were deeply inspired by Mexican modernism and were immersing themselves in its rich style and themes of revolution and radical change. A number of Chicago artists, including Hull-House artists, followed the same trajectory as Topchevsky, also traveling to Mexico to learn from artists there. This group included Myrtle Merritt French (1886–1970), a ceramicist who taught at Hull-House and the School of the Art Institute, and who was one of the founders of Hull-House Kilns. This exchange went both ways, with prominent Mexican artists traveling to the United States to expand the reach of their art.
Hull-House’s ceramics classes were popular with the growing Mexican community in the Near West Side, bringing forth artists like Miguel Juárez and José Ruíz. Torres demonstrated a natural gift for crafting sculptures, pottery, and other ceramic pieces. Topchevsky was stunned by Torres’s talent—his first piece, a sculpted head, was said to have been sold before it was ever fired. While working in the Hull-House Kilns, Torres met Edgar Miller (1899–1993), an accomplished painter, designer, and craftsman known both in and outside of Chicago. Miller took Torres on as an apprentice, and over time their relationship shifted to that of a partnership, with Torres learning much of his later craftsmanship from Miller.
Through the 1930s and 1940s, Torres’s work flourished. He infused his work with designs, motifs, and colors that were drawn from pre-colonial Indigenous art, and was influenced by the popular Best-Maugard method. He worked in many media, including wood, metal, and tile. His pieces were exhibited around the city, he had a consistent flow of individual commissions, and his work alongside Miller resulted in the design and artistry of the Carl Street and Kogen-Miller Studios. He designed interior decor for houses, studios, workshops, and clubs. His jewelry complemented the wardrobes of city socialites. He was invited to lecture at the Art Institute of Chicago.
For much of Torres’s career, the press foregrounded the fact that he was Mexican—an exoticization of his heritage for publicity purposes. A 1942 Chicago Tribune article referred to him as a “Mexican Indian” and paid special attention to the Indigenous motifs he used; the article was subtitled “Indian Workman Gains Fame for Creations.” Another article was titled “Aztecs’ Glory Finds Rebirth in Torres’ Art.” There is no evidence that Torres had an Indigenous background, but it is apparent that there was an effort on the part of the public to cast this identity on him in relation to his work, and to characterize his work as highlighting that supposed heritage in order to share it with others.
In 1947, Torres was commissioned to design five railcars for the Pullman Company’s Rock Island–Southern Pacific rail line. The Tribune featured his work on the cars, which debuted in 1948, the same year he died, at the age of fifty. One car, a dining car called El Cafe, was exhibited at Chicago’s centenary railroad fair shortly after his death. These cars would be seen and traveled in by people throughout the Midwest as well as the southern United States—many of whom were Mexican immigrants, like Torres.
Torres’s life spanned major cultural, artistic, and population shifts. His prolific output across media helped to connect the United States to historical and Indigenous forms of Mexican art and craft. Notably, Torres was included in a series of portraits of “Great Americans” created by the Evanston-born photographer Helen Balfour Morrison, who in the 1930s and 1940s took hundreds of photographs of significant political, artistic, and cultural figures. Alongside those of Jane Addams and other famous Chicagoans, Morrison’s portrait of Torres—an artist, an immigrant, and a “Great American”—might be understood as a tribute to his visibility at the time, and his influence.
Sources:
Peggy Glowacki, “Bringing Art to Life: The Practice of Art at Hull-House,” in Pots of Promise: Mexicans and Pottery at Hull-House, 1920–40, ed. Cheryl R. Ganz and Margaret Strobel (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 20.
Sarah Kelly Oehler, They Seek a City: Chicago and the Art of Migration, 1910–1950 (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 2013), 49.
Cheryl Ganz, “Shaping Clay, Shaping Lives: The Hull-House Kilns,” in Pots of Promise, 61.
“Edgar Miller’s Influences: Jesús Torres, and Mexican Traditional Handicraft,” Edgar Miller Legacy. https://www.edgarmiller.org/jesus-torres.