The Time Is Now! ― Art Worlds of Chicago South Side, 1960-1980

During the 1960s and 70s, Chicago was shaped by art and ideas produced and circulated on its South Side. Defined by the city’s social, political, and geographic divides and by the energies of its multiple overlapping art scenes, this vibrant moment of creative expression produced a cultural legacy whose impact continues to unfold nationally and internationally.
The Time is Now! Art Worlds of Chicago’s South Side, 1960-1980, published in tandem with an exhibition at the Smart Museum of Art, examines this cultural moment—brimming with change and conflict—and the figures who defined it. Focusing primarily on African American artists in and out of the Black Arts Movement, The Time is Now! re-examines watershed cultural moments: from the Wall of Respect to Black Creativity, from the Civil Rights Movement to AfriCOBRA, from vivid protest posters to visionary Afrofuturist art, and from the Hairy Who to the radical sounds of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians.
Employing new scholarship that reassesses and recalibrates traditional narratives of postwar Chicago art, the exhibit resonates with current national dialogues around race, gender, protest, and belonging. The book contains a series of long and short essays, interviews, and other contextual material, along with full-color images of all works included in the exhibition and extensive reproductions of ephemera and historical photographs.

Rebecca Zorach is the Mary Jane Crowe Professor in Art and Art History at Northwestern University, where she teaches and writes on early modern European art, contemporary activist art, and art of the 1960s and 1970s. Marissa Baker is a PhD candidate in the department of Art History at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Davarian Baldwin is the Paul E. Raether Distinguished Professor of American Studies at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. Tempestt Hazel is a curator, writer, artist advocate, and founding editor of Sixty Inches From Center, a Chicago-based online arts publication, archiving initiative, and cultural platform. Mary Pattillo is the Harold Washington Professor of Sociology and African American Studies and Director of Graduate Studies in African American Studies at Northwestern University.