New Museum Exhibits Connect Chicago’s Immigrant History to its Present

Posted on Wednesday, October 6

New Museum Exhibits Connect Chicago’s Immigrant History to its Present

By Elias Cepeda

If you are like most people, you haven’t been to a museum exhibit since those mandatory grade- school field trips of yesteryear. And while we can’t condone it, such cultural negligence can almost be understood.

All too often museums are filled with static and single-dimensioned exhibits, seemingly unconnected to current issues that matter to our everyday lives. The Jane Addams Hull-House Museum on South Halsted is attempting to change that conventional wisdom with a renovated space and brand new exhibits that connect history to the present day in dynamic fashion.

Named after the woman widely recognized as the founder of modern social work, Jane Addams, the museum is in what was of two of the original thirteen buildings that made up the progressive- era settlement to house, train and educate immigrants. Museum Director Lisa Lee believes that the life and legacy of the social activist and Nobel Peace Prize winner is usually minimized and constrained to a simplistic view.

“People often just think of her and think of a quiet old lady in a chair who won a Nobel Prize. But she was once called the most dangerous woman in the country and public enemy number one. She was a radical in that she accepted all people, regardless of race, sexual orientation or country of origin. And she worked for food access, health care, human rights, women’s rights, education reform – all of these issues are still important ones today,” Lee says.

The 150th year anniversary of Addams’ birth, then, was a perfect time for the museum to be overhauled. The new museum contains exhibits that involve many of the senses, and connect our past to the present, with an eye towards social change in the future.

For example, the Sounds like history exhibit allows museum visitors to step back into time and hear the sounds of the old 19th ward on Halsted at the turn of the century, recreated from artifacts and records with the help of sound historian Mark Smith. The decision to incorporate such multi-sensory elements was a deliberate one.

“It is incumbent on cultural institutions to tap into humanity and experience and treat visitors as sentient beings,” Lee says. “Mark Smith talked with us and said that we really fetishize sound in our society. But human beings can also touch, feel, and hear.”

Some of the artifacts that Hull-House Museum visitors can now pick and up and feel for themselves are books from Jane Addams’ personal library. Also in the intimate 1,200 square foot museum space is the A Day in the Life exhibit, which uses artifacts and writings to depict the lives of Polish factory worker and settlement volunteer Hilda Satt Polachek and Jesus Torres, a Mexican immigrant who worked at the Hull-House and later became a celebrated artist.

By focusing on more than just Addams’ own story, Lee says that the new exhibits give a fuller account of the important people involved in the progressive movement, and all their varying views. “We have a section called Meet the Reformers, and it is important to understand that they didn’t all share the same views,” Lee says. “They were different people with different strategies. Jane Addams let socialists, anarchists and unions hold meetings at the Hull House. She was not a socialist, not an anarchist and never joined a union. But she felt it was important for lots of views to be shared. There were also seven thousand immigrants a week coming into the Hull House and some of their stories needed to be told.”

The Museum now also explicitly encourages and facilitates visitors taking action after learning more about social justice and the nation and city’s history. The take action sections of the museum are more than exhibits – they give people a chance to get involved in modern issues like education and prison reform.

“Once you see this need, you feel empowered to do it,” Lee says. “If you learn about the history of immigrant rights, that the Hull House was and is a sanctuary site in addition to a museum site, once you learn about what it meant to be called an ‘illegal’ in a moment in time, that rights are being taken away, then you have a choice of whether or not to do something about it.”

Lee hopes that the new museum will have a broad audience because the history it chronicles is a relatable one today. The work of pioneering social reformers like Jane Addams at the turn of the century was far-reaching and holistic, because it developed from the real-world needs of the people it served.

“This was started by people who entered the public sphere at a certain moment. As woman started careers they realized that they needed a place to put their kids so they started the first public day care center in Chicago. Once kids got older they were working in sweat shops so they realized that was not right and they got anti child labor laws passed,” Lee explains.

“Then they realized that if kids were not working they needed to be in school and there were not enough schools in the 19th ward so they fought for school reform. Then they saw that many kids were being sent to prison with adults so they fought for and created separate juvenile justice courts. It’s not just about prison reform, not just about schools, not just about women’s rights or labor rights, they are all embedded and linked.”

The new Jane Addams Hull-House Museum is located at 800 S. Halsted Street and is free and open to the public on Tuesdays – Fridays, 10am to 4pm, and Sundays, noon to 4pm. www.hullhousemuseum.org