The Freedom Principle: Experiments in Art and Music, 1965 to Now

On the South Side of Chicago in the 1960s, African American artists grappled culturally, politically, and organizationally with the black nationalist turn in the United States Civil Rights movement. Experiments in music, the visual arts, performance, and other forms—as well as in the institutional structures of art making and training—left their mark on many participants. The significance of that moment continues to inform, even haunt, contemporary searches for both individual and collective freedom within the context of today’s black avant-garde. The intergenerational story of this quest for freedom—from the “ancient to the future,” as the Art Ensemble of Chicago put it—is the topic of the book The Freedom Principle: Experiments in Art and Music, 1965 to Now, which accompanies the exhibition appearing at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. The book coincides with the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), a still-f