In this superb addition to scholarship on the Black Arts Movement, Rebecca Zorach captures luminously how black visual artists of the late 1960s and early 1970s strove to situate themselves and their artworks within the settings and spaces of Chicago's African American communities on the South and West Sides. “Community,” Zorach observes, has become a target of academic scepticism, often viewed as a mystifying, homogenizing, and coercive concept that obfuscates contestation and difference, not least in relation to racialized groups. Within Chicago's Black Arts Movement, however, as Zorach convincingly demonstrates, community “was not simple and homogeneous and was not presumed to be so,” and was “premised on negotiating rather than erasing difference” (9). Professional artists who in many cases had been trained in majority-white institutions perceived community, and the wider political imperative of black unity, as a goal, not a given. And they saw their own acceptance and place among residents of Bronzeville or Lawndale as something to be earned.

These arguments are powerfully borne out by Zorach's discussion of the best-known visual creation of Chicago's Black Arts Movement, and perhaps of the movement as a whole. The Wall of Respect, a mural produced on the exterior of a disused South Side building in 1967 under the auspices of the Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC), was not only an album-like assemblage of affirmative images of blackness, but an enactment of a quest for black unity in the very process of its creation: a coalescing of residents across lines of social fracture, as well as a blurring of lines between residents and professional artists. A truce between local gangs (the Blackstone Rangers and Gangster Disciples) was a precondition for the mural's appearance, and as Zorach discerns, the wider community also “had to be behind the painters, literally: working on a scaffold facing away from the street in a dangerous area, the artists had to be able to count on the eyes and ears of the neighbors, whose blessing on the project was thus crucial” (73). Residents gathered around the artists as they worked, and shaped the mural's design by making clear that they would not permit the inclusion of Martin Luther King Jr.'s portrait, and by successfully demanding a revision to Nina Simone's.

As the poet Don L. Lee (Haki Madhubuti) commented in 1968, the Wall embodied a desire to create “art for people's sake” (7), in opposition to modernist valorizing of “art for art's sake.” For OBAC members, art was not a category of objects hived off in galleries and museums, but a process, and one that should create and embody transformation (the Black Arts Movement theorist and practitioner LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka preferred to write of “art-ing,” in his 1964 essay “Hunting Is Not Those Heads on the Wall”). It should derive energy, spirit and involvement from “the people,” help fashion community and proclaim the need for black unity, and be sited within the community's spaces of daily life and interaction. Barbara Jones-Hogu, a key OBAC member, drew inspiration from recent moves towards peace and collaboration among Chicago gangs when she created silkscreens such as Nation Time (1970), and she and other artists including Wadsworth Jarrell and Gerald Williams adopted a “coolade” palette to create works that reflected back to residents the vibrant colours of their clothing. Yet Zorach is rightly attentive to the limits and failures of community building. The “positive images” the movement generated were frequently patriarchal and heteronormative, celebrating blackness in exclusionary ways. Divergent understandings of artistic collaboration also produced fractures, including the disbanding of the OBAC Visual Arts Workshop after one member, William Walker, authorized residents to make alterations to the Wall of Respect without the agreement of the other OBAC artists.

Visual art has received less attention in Black Arts Movement scholarship than have literature and music, and perhaps the book's most powerful and original contribution lies in underscoring how visual art became a means of responding to, and seeking ownership of, the transformation of urban space. Black neighbourhoods had been ruptured and defaced by urban renewal, highway construction, and municipal neglect. The multitude of murals that adorned buildings on Chicago's South and West Sides from the late 1960s onwards testified to the way that artists – taking their lead in part from neighbourhood graffiti – captured the imaginations of local people by involving them in a reclamation and redefinition of their urban environment. Together, they produced not only arresting visual images, but also spaces of coalescence, affirmation and possibility. Murals such as the Wall of Respect became backdrops for performances, rallies and other gatherings, while several of Zorach's other case studies signal how the Black Arts Movement constructed institutional spaces – studios, workshops and community art spaces such as Art & Soul; collectives and communes such as AFRICOBRA – that gave form, within the urban landscape, to black power ideals of autonomy and self-determination.

Zorach acknowledges that for all their intentions to break down barriers between artist and community, few movement artists imagined erasing the distinction entirely. At the end of Art for People's Sake, she contemplates such an erasure herself by asking whether we might read Chicago's West Side uprising of 1968, “however destructive its consequences, and however doomed,” as a “gesture of creation” on the part of the dispossessed: a performative act of political communication and “a conscious attempt at visibly reshaping space and human relationships to it” (294). Arriving at the end of this sensitive exploration of efforts to reconceptualize art as something enmeshed in and inscribed on the fabric of streets and neighbourhoods, the suggestion hardly seems far-fetched.