How did African Americans in 1960s and 1970s Chicago create art rooted in working-class West Side and South Side communities? Art for the People's Sake takes up this question by showing how these Black artists drew inspiration from neighborhood participation and protest politics. These were both controversial stances for artists to take, then as they would be now. These Black artists sought to engage and deepen antiracist activism against pernicious forms of urban renewal, deindustrialization, machine politics, and police repression. Like the artists she examines, Zorach analyzes art within its spatial historical contexts. This book thus brilliantly illuminates the complex dialectic among artists, activists, and other neighborhood residents as well as the cultural work and protest politics these interactions produced.
Zorach details the emergence of the Black Arts movement in Chicago by referencing the previous generation's artists while also explaining that this new generation reflected its own urban political and...