"Art Need Not Be in a Temple"

"In those two decades, people who were artists, activists, and both, did a great deal to mark blackness as an identity: the Black Panthers organised to stop police brutality, while also creating free breakfast and community medical programmes; Nina Simone released To Be Young, Gifted and Black; and Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised black power fists at the 1968 Olympics. And during these years, artists such as Lorraine O'Grady were asking: what is art, who is it for? Taking their work to the streets to insist, as William T Williams put it, that 'art need not be in a temple'. Art could be everywhere."

Steven W. Thrasher at The Guardian discusses the exhibit Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power at Tate Modern in London.