Nathaniel Mary Quinn’s Fragments of Home
His fractured portraits at the National Public Housing Museum reckon with memory, family, and a childhood shaped by Chicago’s Robert Taylor Homes.
CHICAGO — More than 10 million people in the United States have called public housing home over the past century, yet the country boasts only one museum dedicated to the subject. The National Public Housing Museum (NPHM), after nearly two decades as a roving entity, opened a permanent home in Chicago in early 2025. It seeks to address one of the most intersectional of histories, connecting art, design, architecture, human rights, politics, social policy, the economy, systemic racism, immigration trends, policing practices, and more.
The museum occupies the sole remaining section of the Jane Addams Homes, constructed in 1938 on the southwest side of Chicago. It’s currently surrounded by an empty lot nearly the size of a city block, courtesy the Chicago Housing Authority’s Plan of Transformation, launched back in 1999 to solve the problem of deteriorating buildings, unsafe projects, and racial segregation with widescale demolition and the mostly unfulfilled promise of replacement mixed-income housing for all. That plan eventually amounted to the largest net loss of affordable housing in the country’s history. This story is just one of many told at the NPHM via an engaging combination of archival, experiential, historic, and artistic displays.
The day I visited, offerings included an exhibit devoted to personal objects lent by public housing residents across the country, from a hand-stitched wedding dress and a heavyweight championship belt to an item I found especially relatable, a rotary phone with an extra-long cord. A case study of a rare recent success story, the Millers River Apartments in Cambridge, Massachusetts, nearly broke my head with its meticulous dissection of the impossibly complicated American tax credit system. Especially generous are a pair of apartment units recreating the homes of specific families representative of particular eras: the Turovitzes, Jewish immigrants who were among the first to occupy the Jane Addams Homes, and the Hatches, an African-American couple with eight children who moved in in 1960. A third apartment, set in the 1950s, screens an immersive film explaining what happened in between from a policy perspective, including redlining and racist covenants, via the entrancing silhouette puppetry of the performance collective Manual Cinema.
The museum’s courtyard delights with large limestone animal sculptures, designed by local polymath Edgar Miller for the Jane Addams Homes’ original outdoor play area, now beautifully restored. Also outside are three bang-up works of public art. “Still Here: Zhegagoynak” (2024), a palimpsestic 40-foot-tall (~12.2m) mural by Andrea Carlson, acknowledges the land under the NPHM as being unceded by the Potawatomi. Amanda Williams and Olalekan Jeyifous fashioned an exuberant glass entry portico splashed with colors taken from paint chips left behind when the building’s final residents were forced to move out — vivid hues applied to apartment walls in defiance of Chicago Housing Authority rules mandating beige or light green. Over in the parking lot, Marisa Morán Jahn and Rafi Segal invented new ways to play basketball using a tricycle-mounted hoop system and a radically reimagined court design.
