UIC lessons guide creation of first national public housing museum

As the executive director of the newly opened National Public Housing Museum in the Little Italy neighborhood, Lisa Yun Lee believes her mission is to ensure visitors consider housing as a human right.

“I want people to come and have their expectations challenged and provoked to become active citizens in determining the future of housing and to understand that when activists, scholars, students and the community come together, we can create real change,” Lee said.

Lee, associate professor of public culture and museum studies, has been affiliated with UIC for 20 years and has held many roles in that time, including as the director of the UIC School of Art and Art History and director of the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum, where she oversaw a renovation of the historic structure.

The National Public Housing Museum, which opened April 4, is on the site of the only remaining building of the Jane Addams Homes complex, which was built in 1938. The complex of 1,027 units stretched across 32 buildings and housed hundreds of working-class families. This location was chosen for the museum because it’s the oldest federal housing project in Chicago and is a way to celebrate public housing in the city.

When they pass through the front doors of the museum at 919 S. Ada St., visitors will step back in history and be able to see displayed artifacts and read recollections for free. Exhibits that require a paid tour include two completely recreated apartments that show how families lived in the Jane Addams projects in different eras. The recreated homes belonged to the immigrant Turovitz family, who lived in the complex in the 1930s, and the Hatch family, who lived there in the 1960s. The artifacts include furniture, examples of the food they ate and even reading material and toiletries.

A free exhibit, “History Lessons,” includes artifacts from people — both famous and unknown — who grew up in public housing. Graduation pictures of a young U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor are paired with her recollections of growing up in the Bronxdale Houses in the Bronx, New York. There’s a prized image of a young community organizer named Barak Obama taken by a resident of the Lake Park Place apartments on Chicago’s South Side. Among Lee’s favorite artifacts is a wall-mounted rotary phone with a cord so long it extended to each room of an apartment, according to its former owner.

To honor and continue its role as a housing structure, the museum site includes 15 mixed-income apartments the Chicago Housing Authority maintains.

General admission to the museum is free, but reservations are encouraged.

Lee recently spoke with UIC today about her vision for the museum and how UIC is part of its DNA.

How has your time at UIC prepared you to take the helm of the nation’s first public housing museum?

Everything that I’ve learned about museums developed when I was at the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum and had that amazing opportunity to think about how a small, house museum could play a large role in shaping our nation’s civic conversations around democracy, immigration rights, food justice, labor rights, gender justice and environmental justice. It was a realization that to be at a public university, museums have a public mission and what it means to be there to ask critical questions about what is in our commonwealth and what is part of the public good.

That is, first and foremost, what the National Public Housing Museum is about. It’s not even so much about housing, but it’s about our relationship with the public. UIC’s mission as a public university has informed and shaped my understanding of public housing and what it means to be a radically democratic, inclusive and diverse museum.

I also learned at UIC, as part of the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum and the UIC School of Art and Architecture, that the arts and culture play a critical role in helping us determine our nation’s future. Artists unleash our radical imaginations. Artists see the world in new ways, and art and culture bring us together across divides to realize our collective humanity. This museum is very much the realization of everything I do and I’m committed to at UIC as a part of that community working in the art field.

What do you want UIC students and the community to take away from the museum, especially since it’s close to the UIC campus?

People who go to UIC are not locked inside an “ivory tower” learning space. Everything that happens on the UIC campus reverberates outward, and as a museum of public housing, I want the UIC students to realize that there’s a pressing issue of housing insecurity that so many people face, including our students. Together, we can address this and solve it.

As a cultural institution, we are here for them as a place to organize, to gather, to work across boundaries of differences — of race, of class, of gender. This is also a museum that belongs to them. It’s free. I want them to come through here and to see the exhibitions, to participate in curating and to help do programming, and for us to be as close collaborators as possible.

Will you incorporate UIC into the museum, such as with exchanges, internships or other programs?

Yes, 100%. This museum would not have happened without the students who helped and participated in coursework. The museum was very much part of the classes that I taught. We’ve hired graduates of UIC. The associate curator and exhibitions manager, Alex Maher, and the program coordinator, Mark Jaeschke, are graduates of the UIC museum and exhibition studies program. Also, we’ve had many UIC undergrads from gender and women’s studies from the Social Justice Initiative who’ve worked here. We’ve also worked with Alexander Eisenschmidt, an associate professor in the School of Architecture. We’re just down the street from UIC, and so I’m hoping to build as many close partnerships as possible.

What is your favorite exhibit in the museum?

I would have to say “History Lessons” because that one is informed a lot by the scholarship of people that I write and do research on. It’s this history of the vernacular, the everyday and the importance of storytelling. And so that exhibit, which brings together everyday objects to tell large stories about social, cultural and economic history, but through the voices of public housing residents themselves, I think is my favorite thing. It has a wealth of stories to tell through mostly everyday objects. Also, there is a beautiful exhibit about the history of the WPA with a section about the important role that artists play in a democracy. And UIC Assistant Professor of Art William Estrada has some beautiful prints that we hand out for free to all people in this space, and every visitor is completely enthralled by his work.

The National Public Housing Museum is on the site of the Jane Addams homes.