A. Montgomery Ward Gallery
Chicago Circle Center

Gallery Hours:
Monday-Thursday 12:00 noon -9:00 p.m.
Friday 12:00 noon-5:00

Sponsored by
Jane Addams Hull-House Museum
CUB Art Exhibits Committee

Adapted from a design in "Hull-House: for the 40th Anniversary Celebration," UIC Jane Addams Memorial Collection, Hull-House Association Records [10-57].

Art
Dance
Music
Theater

In 1889, Jane Addams and her college friend Ellen Gates Starr opened the Hull-House settlement house in a crowded immigrant neighborhood on Chicago's Near West Side. Established as a social, educational, and service center for the crowded and poverty stricken neighborhood, the Hull-House settlement hoped to establish reciprocal relationships with the neighborhood in which middle-class women and men residents could both learn from and assist their immigrant neighbors.

Hull-House developed an extensive arts program. While settlement residents fought to create neighborhood conditions in which art could thrive, the arts programs expanded to provide space, guidance, and resources to nurture the creativity and talent of their Near West Side neighbors.

The settlement provided space in which women could participate in the arts on equal terms with men and in which they could display or perform their work publically. Women created and participated in a vibrant and wide-ranging art program that valued the aesthetic power but also the social function of art.