Jane Addams Hull House Museum

THE AUTHENTIC CHICAGO COMMUNITY

The Authentic Chicago Community is a public art project created by teaching artists and youth addressing issues of urban renewal and gentrification in Chicago at future site of the Public Housing Museum. This historic site of the Jane Addams Homes located at 1322 W. Taylor was Chicago's first Public Housing Development built in 1938.

During the collaborative creative process for The Authentic Chicago Community, a mixed media public installation, artists spent ten days examining the cityscape, collecting images, and considering the idea of ‘home' in the context of immigration debates that bring into question "who is truly at home in Chicago?" Artists grappled with defining what the authentic Chicago community may be in an age of constant urban renewal, gentrification, community displacement, and influxes of new immigrant communities. Youth participants were led by teaching artists Charlie Fornia, Krista Franklin, Andres Hernandez and Mario Gonzalez Jr.

Meeting at the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum, the group tapped the relevant local history of the Hull-House Settlement, an example of a site where diverse communities converged, creating a unique experience of home and a site for discourse about community, cultural differences, and a shared interest in creating habitable home for all in Chicago and the nation. While the neighborhoods around Hull-House (which included the Jane Addams Homes) were constantly changing, the site of the Hull-House complex underwent drastic changes including growth and demolition. Artists considered the forces at play in these changes and how they relate to the forces changing the rest of Chicago. For more information click here.

_{Photographs courtesy of Jane Addams Hull-House Museum}

_{Photograph by Rich Cahan}

_{Photographs by Deirdre Colgan}