Art for People's Sake

More than a decade ago, in The Black Arts Movement (2005), James Edward Smethurst articulated the necessity for critical studies of the black arts movement, the cultural component to the better-known and better-documented black power movement. He charged that scholars should do more to chart national and regional trends that contributed to the movement's theoretical, cultural, and aesthetic underpinnings. Rebecca Zorach heeded this call with her exhaustive examination, Art for People's Sake. She concentrates on the visual arts, an area less studied in black arts movement surveys, and the artists who defined and sustained the movement in the urban Midwest but were left out of traditional art histories. Zorach draws on her previous research, extensive interviews, and her own archiving initiative to place Chicago in the pantheon of black arts and artists during this epoch. The work is laser focused on the midwestern industrial city, specifically the South Side

Aesthetics · Art · Black Power · Movement (music · Political science · Politics · Sociology · The arts · Visual arts · Art, Politics, and Modernism · Cinema and Media Studies · History · Law · Race, History, and American Society