Edgar Miller’s Influences:
Jesús Torres, and Mexican Traditional Handicraft

The Latin American Immigrant Diaspora in the Midwest

Even as the revolutionary Mexican Modern Fine Arts movement leaders like Rivera, Orozco, and Siqueiros were making broad strides in the United States, Central American traditional folk art and design was finding its way into the creative imagination of communities north of the border in a much more subtle way. Hull-House, on Chicago’s Near West Side, had become a bustling community center for immigrants of Italian, German, Polish, Scandinavian, Russian, and Jewish backgrounds since its founding in 1895. Many of these European immigrant families were also able to find necessary support and a pre-established extended community in local Catholic and Protestant Churches, and Jewish synagogues, around the Maxwell Street area and in other parts of the city. These houses of worship played an important role to immigrant families by serving as a non-governmental source of welfare, and where non-English-speaking individuals could find much-needed social assistance in a place that spoke their respective native languages. Mexican immigrants, as part of the post-Revolution diaspora of laborers, refugees, and professionals from all social classes, faced unique hardships, which allowed them to imbue their unique identities in the US in different ways than immigrants from Europe.

It wasn’t until the late 1910s when the first substantial wave of Mexican immigrants and their families came to Chicago, and they often did so sporadically and after traveling around various regions of the United States seeking menial labor typically relegated to migrant workers. Predominantly coming from western Mexican states such as Jalisco and Michoacán, these itinerant laborers traveled over land, stopping through Texas and the American Southwest before making their way to the northern parts of the country. The turmoil that the Mexican Revolution wrought south of the border was a driving factor in their willingness to start a new life in a city as foreign and far away as Chicago. The long-term effects of the Revolution on populations in Mexico and the US would change the culture and livelihood of millions of Mexican-born people over the next decade, and has had a profound effect on generations of their descendants to this day. The anticlerical regimes that reigned in Mexico during the Revolution created a deficit of Catholic clergy throughout the country, many of whom went into hiding or left the Church. Mexican immigrants to US cities like Chicago found themselves in a new place among a diverse population of fellow immigrants, without the support of a networked, church-based community that other ethnic groups had benefited from. However, these immigrants brought with them a strong sense of identity, industriousness, and creativity that forever changed Chicago’s cultural landscape.

Jesús Torres & the Traditional Folk Aesthetic

Jesús Torres was one such immigrant, who came to Hull-House along with his wife, Mariá Francisca Araujo Torres, who encouraged her husband to make the tough decision to come to the US undocumented and unemployed from rural Silao, Guanajuato, Mexico, in 1924. First traveling around the country, to Texas and then to Minnesota to work as day laborers, the Torreses eventually migrated to Chicago around 1926. Jesús Torres looked for work in railroad construction and factory manual labor; however, his small stature did not predispose the 26-year-old day laborer to many manufacturing industry tasks, and so instead he found his way to the Hull-House Kilns. Torres had an innate artistic ability and brought with him the traditional folk design aesthetic that had become a staple of art education in Mexico during the decade of the Revolution. The “Best-Maugard Method,” named after artist Adolfo Best-Maugard, articulated a common design language derived from Pre-Columbian Latin American art. Best-Maugard’s book Drawing Method: Tradition, Resurgence, and Evolution of Mexican Art, had become a popular part of arts curricula in Mexico, and even traveled through parts of the US, eventually being added to the Hull-House educational canon. Torres was already very familiar with the foundational design elements articulated in Best-Maugard’s theories: the spiral, circle, half circle, ‘s’, wavy line, broken line, and straight line, all derived from Aztec and Mayan motifs. According to the method, mastering and combining these motifs across any number of media was the bedrock of universally good aesthetic production. Underlying the methodology was a popular desire within the Mexican-American diasporal community to keep alive traditional cultural tenets and a unified identity, which the Hull-House educators also encouraged.

Jesús Torres quickly became a prolific artisan, adept not only at throwing and firing beautiful ceramics, but also at glazing and decoration. Torres would often incorporate traditional, pre-colonial designs, drawing from Aztec and Mayan motifs and colorways. The cross-cultural handicraft aesthetic that Torres readily produced was a shining example of the resurgence of traditional design in modern art promulgated by Revolutionary Mexican artists. Torres was largely self-taught and expanded upon his native design aesthetic with Hull-House teachers like Myrtle Meritt French and Morris Topchevsky, who promulgated some of the most quintessential aspects of Mexican art theory from the 1920s within the Chicago art scene. By 1927, Edgar Miller had been a part of the Hull-House community for nearly a decade, since his move from Idaho to Chicago in 1917, and he had worked closely and formed parallel careers with French and Topchevsky, when he eventually met Torres in the kilns and workshops there. 

Miller took Torres under his wing as an apprentice, with Miller introducing Torres to heavy craftwork like woodworking, metalwork, tile laying, and artistic masonry, which they put into practice immediately at the Carl Street and Kogen-Miller Studios, began in 1927 and 1928, respectively (these projects would eventually come to be known collectively with Miller’s other homegrown architectural projects as the Handmade Homes). Miller’s close work with artists of traditional handicraft like Jesús Torres were partnerships of mutual admiration, as evidenced by the extensive design work they collaboratively created, and which decorate the Handmade Homes to this day.

Both artists had a talent and love for unconventional materials, open to experimenting with items made of broken marble, petrified wood, and even old tin cans. Torres also carved a number of patterned, wooden doors and other elements for the Kogen-Miller projects and later for admirers and private residential commissions around Chicago, as well as Pullman train car interiors, including a five-car project for the Rock Island-Southern Pacific Railway. Both artists also had a seemingly endless capacity for production. Torres would come to work together with Miller on several projects over the years, mainly in the construction of private residences and design of embedded art. Another site that deserves more attention is the studios and workshops at 5136 Blackstone Avenue in Hyde Park, where much of the artistic craftwork throughout is attributed to Torres. Torres eventually resided there and set up a studio, creating jewelry, decorative home goods, and handicraft products that he sold throughout much of the rest of his career. As both artists began their own prolific, independent careers, Torres would go on to continue to work with Sol Kogen on other Old Town studio homes after Miller and Kogen’s business partnership was dissolved. 

Especially receptive to Torres’ traditional aesthetic, Miller forged a partnership in which both artists collaborated to share visionary motif work and repetitive design, and where Miller helped Torres hone his craft in a variety of media. More than the complex and beautiful aesthetics, perhaps what attracted Miller most to Torres was the ethos encouraged at the Hull-House and carried on to the project of the Handmade Homes, which was one that celebrated collaborative partnerships in the development of a unified spirit and identity, forged in pursuit of creativity. The Handmade Homes were sites of experimentation and amalgamation on a much larger scale than anything they had done before. Torres’ contribution to the buildings brought a slightly different style of art and craftwork that was more rooted in Mexican design and aesthetics. His hand can be seen in entire rooms of the Carl Street Studios, for instance in his design of many of the studio bathrooms and kitchens, incorporating a kaleidoscopic array of floor-to-ceiling ceramic work, including painted tile, with a bright blend of laying styles. Since most of the pieces around the studio projects aren’t signed, it’s often hard to tell where one artist’s work ends and the other beings, however it is helpful to note that Miller’s work tends to be more delicate and expressionistic, while Torres’ work tends to be bolder and more rigid in its design and construction. Both artists were incredibly precise in their work, celebrating traditional Mexican culture in their prolific craftsmanship throughout their careers.