Radical Craft Gallery Discussion: Artisans and their Expression of American Freedoms
When
July 14th, 4-5pm
Where
Lincoln Galleries at Historic Yellow Springs, 1685 Art School Road, Chester Springs
Tickets
Free and Open to the Public
Art historian Annie Storr, College of the Holy Cross, leads an informal gallery talk which puts Radical Compassion: Art as Social Action in the context of generations of skilled artisans who used -and continue to use- their prowess in craft to protest injustice and forward their vision of “a more perfect Union.”
Radical Compassion: Art as Social Action, On display now through August 9th in the Lincoln Galleries at Historic Yellow Springs “asks how small acts of care, labor, and participation can build toward meaningful change,” the curatorial team shared. “This opening is an opportunity for the community to gather, reflect, and create together.”
The exhibition runs May 25 through August 9, 2026, and is free to the public. Historic Yellow Springs continues its mission of connecting art, history, and the environment through exhibitions, educational programming, and community engagement.
About Presenter Dr. Annie Storr
Annie V. F. Storr has devoted her career to exploring the intersection of art history and education, in theory and in practice. Her longstanding research combines both fields, a multidisciplinary study of the life and work of Ellen Gates Starr (1859-1940), co-founder of Hull House Settlement in Chicago. She is a native of Chicago.
Annie has been a practicing museum educator for more than 30 years, starting as Curator of Education at the Winnipeg Art Gallery (Canada). She created the guided-looking method called, “Exercises for the Quiet Eye,” practiced in museums, schools and campuses nationally. Her project at Ragdale is completion of her book about the philosophy and practice of “EQE.” The method is named after The Quiet Eye by Sylvia Shaw Judson, the sculptor who lived and worked at Ragdale when it was her family home.
Among other positions, Annie Storr has been Founding Chair of Education Studies and Associate Professor at the Corcoran College of Art and Design in Washington, DC; Director of the Arts Management Program at American University; Head of Education Programs at the American Association of Museums; Visiting Professor in American Art History at the University of Virginia.
She was the first Museum Educator to receive the Smithsonian Institution’s Post-doctoral Research Fellowship in American Art History. Her dissertation, an intellectual history of themes in contemporary docent tours, which traced them back to the 18th Century, won her a National Graduate Fellowship. Later, she represented the Museum Field in the first Federal policy paper on Lifelong Learning, “Building a Nation of Learners.” Annie has received fellowships and honors from the Whiting Foundation, the Henry Luce Foundation, the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Brandeis University, and Pendle Hill.
Annie has published articles and essays across interdisciplinary lines between history, aesthetics and pedagogy since the 1990s. Her most recent publications are exhibition catalogue essays for “Polly Thayer Starr: Nearer the Essence,” Fruitlands Museum, “How Will They Know We Were Here? 100 Years Beyond Women’s Suffrage,” Kniznick Gallery, Brandeis University, and the article “Scotland’s John Duncan in Ellen Gates Starr’s Chicago: A Transatlantic Collaboration in Art Activism” for the Journal of the Scottish Society for Art History (all 2020). She is delighted to have the opportunity to take time to finish Exercises for the Quiet Eye, a book of reflective practice in museums and galleries, which has been on the back burner for too long.
PhD in American Art History from the University of Delaware,
MAT in Museum Education from George Washington University,
MA in History of Art from the University of Toronto,
Majors in Religion and Art at Oberlin College.
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Questions?
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