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When Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr founded Chicago’s famous Hull-House in 1889, artistic experience was fundamental to its conception of individual and societal advancement. Resident workers believed access to art was necessary to participation in a democracy. Butler Art Gallery, first among 16 structures eventually comprising the settlement, was Chicago’s first public art gallery. The first craft demonstration venue of its kind, The Labor Museum , opened before 1900. Weaving, kilns, book-bindery, studio classes for all ages, museum tours, courses in art history all followed. Here, some of America’s first craft-workers’ unions were organized. During the 20^th Century, Hull-House shifted substantially toward emergent social sciences and social policy. Meanwhile, artistic labor and art education remained central to Hull-House’s neighborhood programs. The settlement’s resources and workers dispersed mid-century, leaving their mark on Urban Gateways and similar agencies. Its influence on Chicago, on 1200 American settlements, and on community arts lasts into the 21^st Century. When Hull-House was demolished in 1967, the original house was preserved as the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum. There, art experiences thrive, including workshops by a speaker as this proposal was written. Through 130 years, combining studio experience, exposure to culturally diverse arts, and a social theory of creative collaboration has driven continuous, but changing, art activism. This has survived Hull-House’s total transformation from radical social experiment, to one of Chicago’s signature institutions, to an outward-focused campus museum. Based in history, this session is present-minded. Thirty-minute general discussion: “How can we use these precedents and practices today?”