For all its long history, the community gathering is one of the least written-about corners of the art world. The grand institutions get the libraries. The feast-day procession, the open studio, the street painting and the neighbourhood mural tend to slip past unrecorded, even though they are where most people actually meet art for the first time. Over the past few decades, though, a small and excellent shelf of books has set out to take this kind of art seriously, and it rewards anyone who goes looking.

The five titles below come at the subject from different heights. One is a vast illustrated survey of art made with and for communities, another is the foundational study of art as conversation, and a third is a lyrical meditation on place and belonging. The last two come right down to ground level, one a practical handbook for making this work, the other a glorious chronicle of the mural programme on our own doorstep.

All five are available on Amazon, and several appear in paperback and ebook as well as hardback, so it is worth comparing formats and sellers before you buy.

The big picture

1. Living as Form: Socially Engaged Art from 1991 to 2011 edited by Nato Thompson

If you want to grasp the sheer scale and variety of art made with communities rather than for collectors, start here. Growing out of a major exhibition staged by Creative Time in New York, this lavishly illustrated volume gathers more than a hundred projects from around the world, each one documented in colour, from collectives that help communities challenge corporate power to artists who turn whole neighbourhoods into collaborators.

Alongside the projects sit commissioned essays from leading critics and theorists, including Claire Bishop, Carol Becker and Shannon Jackson, who argue about what this slippery, definition-defying genre actually is. It is the most browsable book on the list and the best single place to see how far the idea of the gathering can stretch, from theatre and activism to urban planning and public health.

2. Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art by Grant H. Kester

This is the book that gave community art its language. Grant Kester, an art historian at the University of California, San Diego, was among the first to study seriously a network of artists and collectives who build their work out of dialogue with diverse audiences, and who treat the conversation itself as the art. He situates these socially conscious projects historically and offers a framework for understanding why they matter.

Provocative, accessible and engaging despite its university-press pedigree, it has become required reading for anyone thinking about the social dimension of art. If Living as Form shows you the what, this explains the why, and it does so with a rare combination of clarity and civic conviction.

Place, people and practice

3. The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society by Lucy R. Lippard

Lucy Lippard, one of the most influential art writers America has produced, turns here from the gallery to the ground beneath our feet. Weaving together cultural history, geography, photography and contemporary public art, she explores what it means to belong to a place, and how art rooted in a particular community and landscape can carry, in her phrase, both roots and reach.

Beautifully illustrated and written with a lightly acidic wit, the book reads as an encyclopedic study of the art of community, ranging across small towns, suburbs, cities and rural land. For anyone drawn to the idea of the local gathering, of art that knows exactly where it is, this is the most rewarding and resonant read on the list.

4. Education for Socially Engaged Art: A Materials and Techniques Handbook by Pablo Helguera

Where the other books explain and survey, this one rolls up its sleeves. Pablo Helguera, an artist and longtime educator at the Museum of Modern Art, has written a practical, hands-on handbook for actually making art with communities, with short, sharp chapters on community, conversation, collaboration, performance and documentation.

It is the book to put in your back pocket if you are tempted to organise a gathering of your own, whether an open studio, a participatory project or a neighbourhood event. Spirited and refreshingly free of jargon, it treats the difficulties honestly, including the awkward question of when a community project is art and when it is simply good work done well.

Closer to home

5. Philadelphia Murals and the Stories They Tell by Jane Golden, Robin Rice and Monica Yant Kinney

We close right on our own doorstep. In 1984 Jane Golden, a young muralist from Margate in South Jersey, took charge of what was meant to be a brief youth project within the city’s anti-graffiti effort. It grew into the Mural Arts Program, the largest public art project of its kind in the country, which has since covered Philadelphia with thousands of murals painted by artists, residents and volunteers working side by side.

This lushly photographed chronicle goes behind the walls to show how the murals are actually made, a process the authors describe as much an art of diplomacy and consensus as of paint. It is the perfect final read for this list, because it shows the community gathering at its fullest, with the neighbourhood not as the audience but as the artist, just across the river from where our own series is based.

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Final thoughts

Read together, these five books trace the same idea from the heights down to the street. Thompson and Kester map the field and name its central principle, that art can be made of conversation and community rather than of objects alone. Lippard grounds that principle in place and belonging, Helguera shows how to put it into practice, and Golden and her collaborators show what it looks like when a whole city picks up a brush.

Whichever you begin with, you will come away looking at the next street fair, open studio or mural a little differently, more aware that the oldest way of meeting art is also the most human, a town setting a date, opening a door and trusting its neighbours to come.