National Public Housing Museum to Open in Chicago

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A new museum dedicated to tracing the history of public housing in the US will open tomorrow in Chicago.

The Art Newspaper reports the National Public Housing Museum (NPHM) will be based in a 45,000-square-foot, three-story space that was the last remaining building in the Jane Addams Homes, one of Chicago’s oldest federal housing projects.

The $16.5 million museum was proposed in the late 1990 as a memorial to the public housing projects that were constructed in the late 1930s but were being demolished after the structures fell into disrepair. The museum includes a permanent collection and archive funded by the Mellon Foundation and will feature contemporary art commissions that recall the resilience of public housing communities that were marginalized along racial and economic lines.

“The residents wanted a museum that would call on the power of place and memory to challenge the mainstream narrative about the failure of public housing in the US,” said Lisa Yun Lee, the NPHM’s director and chief curator. “It’s now a history museum that meets a world-class art museum, which is what makes it unique. We had to be really innovative in creating this museum because the archives were not filled with objects for us to use. The stories and artifacts of people who are living in poverty and in the so-called marginal society are not preserved with the same voraciousness as objects by wealthy white men. We are committed to collecting objects that make people understand that these stories are valuable to us as a nation, and that we can learn from the lives and the survival and thriving of public housing residents.”