“The Cause of Art is the Cause of the People: Ellen Gates Starr, Artist/Socialist, and Hull House’s First Artistic Generation.”

Co-founder of Hull-House, trained at Doves Bindery, Socialist aldermanic candidate, Starr, was a personal bridge between Chicago and the socio-economic aesthetics of the Arts and Crafts Movement; early women artist/labor organizers (Mary O’Sullivan, May Morris and Sylvia Pankhurst); and international social innovators (Samuel and Henrietta Barnett, Patrick Geddes). An experienced teacher of art and languages, Starr organized several "schools of art" (comprising art history lecture courses, children’s workshops, fine arts atelier, and industrial shops) at Hull House. She constantly explored ways to apply the social philosophies of Ruskin, Morris (et al) in America. She was instrumental in forming Arts and Crafts associations and exhibitions around the USA; published technical guides and polemics on the Art and Labor; began the Art History program at Chautauqua NY; interviewed Irish weavers bound for the Columbian Exposition; sponsored the Women’s Leather Workers Union; founded and presided over the Chicago Public School Arts Association (still existent, renamed). She even appears at the vanguard art colony of Byrdcliffe (Woodstock, NY) as an instructor in its first year. Late in life, she influenced the inclusion of art in the Catholic Liturgical Movement. Acquainted with William Morris’s rallying cry since 1892, Starr devoted her unconventional career to the maxim which ended her memorial eulogy in 1940: “The cause of art is the cause of the people.” An idealist, but a practitioner rather than a theorist, Starr led by example in the shaping of both some of Hull-House’s most successful and least sustainable visual art initiatives, continually experimenting.