“Painting and Fine Arts in Hull House’s Middle-Years: The Representation of Cultural Diversity & Social Justice.”

During the heyday of the 1920s, and through the 1930s, Hull-House was a major center for teaching and exhibiting art, especially by artists with concerns for social justice and the plight of immigrants and racial minorities. Such painters and graphic artists as Mitchell Siporin, William Jacobs, Emily Edwards, Leon Garland, and Charles White made those subjects the major themes of their imagery, often joining other groups of artists with a similar passion and world view. This cohort was active during the decades when social work and many progressive urban advocates veered strongly in the direction of sociology, economics and policy formation. At the same time, distinctions made between fine, craft and industrial art had immediate implications in the context of a social service institution facing critical needs among their constituents. Teachers, artists, activists, they were the core of new groups that formed to deal directly with the effects of the Great Depression in their communities and beyond. As artists connected to Hull-House, and recognized by that connection, they were a part of a larger community with a similar commitment to social justice, integral to the institution’s actual and perceived responses to conditions in the city.