T helma Golden doesn’t collect art, at least not in the way we might define it in the art world today. “I live with some art, but not a lot,” the Studio Museum in Harlem director and chief curator tells me, a few rows of her bookshelves visible behind her during our Zoom on a late-summer afternoon. “I often say that I get the pleasure of living in a museum.” Last year, in an interview with The New Yorker’s Calvin Tomkins, Golden declined to share what art she lives with, adding that she thinks of her home as “her sanctuary.” A few years earlier, however, she revealed to The Financial Times that if she could collect any artist, it would be the 20th-century Black painter Alma Thomas. The two share a birthday—September 22—and, Golden explained, “I feel a connection to her spirit.” Golden first discovered Thomas when she was an intern at the Studio Museum, and she credits this discovery to setting her on the path to where she is today.
At a young age, Golden knew she wanted to be a curator. When she was 10, she was given the board game Masterpiece, which came with postcard-sized versions of artworks from the Art Institute of Chicago. The game interested her less than the small reproductions of art; she began arranging them on her bedroom wall with Fun-Tak. Golden can’t remember the precise moment she first visited the Studio Museum, but it was during her childhood in Queens. Her father, an insurance broker, and her mother, who volunteered with the NAACP, were deeply invested in educating Golden and her brother about culture. As a family, they often went into Manhattan to go to museums, dance performances, the theater and more. When she was 15, Golden began visiting museums on her own. She also interned at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where her obsession with art took professional root. “What I am doing right now began when I was a young person in the city,” she tells me. “I look back and I see how much of it informed not simply my role as a curator and the director of a museum, but my belief in the importance of cultural institutions.”
This year marks Golden’s 25th anniversary at the Studio Museum in Harlem, and 20th as its director and chief curator. In November, the institution is unveiling a new building—a project that has been many years in the making and will have cost some $300 million to build. With 82,000 square feet, it will feature a theater, a studio for artists in residence, an education center, a rooftop terrace and a cafe—as well as increased exhibition space and public areas. It was designed by Adjaye Associates, with Cooper Robertson as the executive architect. (The Studio Museum cut its association with David Adjaye after allegations of sexual harassment and misconduct were made public; Adjaye has denied them.) The new building takes its inspiration from the neighborhood’s vibrant cultural life and architecture. More than just a museum, it will serve as an incubator and a community hub.
“With the new Studio Museum in Harlem building, Thelma has achieved what most people would think of—and treat—as their life’s achievement. But she’s just getting started,” says the writer Hilton Als, who first met Golden when she was a young curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art in the 1990s.
“It’s profound,” Golden says of this next chapter for the Studio Museum. “I just met our summer interns a week ago. I said to them, ‘I was an intern here.’ If you had said to me then, ‘Oh, and then you will be the director...’” In so many ways, the new building reflects the incredible arc of Golden’s career, though she is the first to point out that in no way would any of this be possible without the help of countless friends of the museum, board members, staff, volunteers, collaborators and others.
The artist Glenn Ligon, a longtime friend of Golden’s, doesn’t disagree, but adds, “To build a museum from scratch means you not only have to hold in your head what the museum needs on the first day it is open, but also what the institution will need to be 10, 20, 30 years in the future. Thelma’s unique ability is to see and anticipate both things simultaneously.”
T he word “collector” has Latin roots, originally meaning “someone who gathers” objects or items (or, as was often the case, taxes). Golden is first and foremost a curator, but she doesn’t deny that her job requires a similar acumen for gathering. “We are all operating from a similar mission—whether it’s individual or institutional—and I’m intrigued by the many different ways this passion evidences itself, whether in a private collection, someone’s home or in a public institution,” she says.
As the director of the Studio Museum, she sees collecting as being not dissimilar to being a steward—a steady hand to guide the museum to where it needs to go, while also still being mindful of its history. “For me, that means imagining the narratives we want to create through our collection that will not only be a way to honor the voice and vision of artists, but also tell a story of the collective ideas, thoughts, hopes and imaginings of an artist’s community at a particular moment,” she says.
This perspective is clear in Golden’s decision to mount a retrospective of the artist Tom Lloyd for the Studio Museum’s new building opening. Lloyd was one of the inaugural artists featured in the museum, with the solo exhibition, “Electronic Refractions II,” when it first opened its doors in 1968. Lloyd was an early pioneer in electrical lights, collaborating in the 1960s with the Radio Corporation of America (RCA). His pieces are beautiful, soulful wall-mounted sculptures made of electronically programmed flashing lights that possess their own geometric language, precise and colorful at once. Lloyd, who died in 1996, was also an educator, an activist and the founder of the Store Front Museum, the first art museum in Queens; he’s a fitting and complex figure for the museum to highlight. At the same time, an Artist-in-Residence Alumni exhibition will also go on view, featuring new works on paper from dozens of artists, such as Kevin Beasley, Wangechi Mutu, Nari Ward, Noah Jemisin and Cynthia Hawkins, who have passed through the Studio Museum’s residency program and continued on to be successful in their own right.
In many ways, Golden says, she sees herself as an “interlocutor between the artist, the object and the audience.” Early on, she understood her love for art did not translate to being an artist. But that doesn’t mean her work is devoid of creativity. “I do think curatorial work is a kind of authorship. I’m striving to be in conversations with artists, and sometimes that ends up becoming an exhibition. Sometimes that means writing about the work,” she says. “As a curator, I don’t always feel you can name the place at which your curatorial practice is or how it’s going to play out in every exhibition. For me, it is different every time. It is found around deep research, lots of looking, incredibly engaged thinking and as a collaboration either between those objects or the artists themselves.”
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olden made a name for herself early in her career. In 1991, when she was 26, she was hired by Whitney Museum director David A. Ross as the museum’s first Black curator. At the time, work by Black artists was noticeably segregated in the art world, rarely appearing in major institutions and galleries. Golden mounted a series of exhibitions between 1991 and 1993 at the Whitney’s Philip Morris branch, in the atrium of the Philip Morris building, on Park Avenue, showcasing the work of artists whose work she found most promising, regardless of race. Many of those names—Lorna Simpson, Alison Saar, Gary Simmons—are recognizable today. In 1993, she was one of the curators named for the Whitney Biennial, which set out to define the next generation of conceptual art, incorporating newer mediums like film, media, found footage and more. One of the more memorable works was the 10-minute tape filmed by a plumbing salesman named George Holliday of Rodney King being beaten by a police officer, a seminal moment in recent American history that set off the Los Angeles riots of 1992, and is to this day a horrifying example of police brutality. The contemporary response from establishment critics at Time and The New York Times was close to contempt. Today, the 1993 biennial is a benchmark in art history, a show that is still discussed and examined in contemporary art discourse.
Ligon—whom Golden championed at the Philip Morris building and in the biennial—remembers Golden from that time and how much he believed in her. “Thelma was a model curator in that she was concerned first about the direction you wanted to take your work, before thinking about what was best for the institution,” he recalls. “For example, I showed paintings in the 1991 Whitney Biennial, but when Thelma invited me to be in the 1993 biennial, I proposed a photo-text piece exploring Robert Mapplethorpe’s photos of Black men entitled ‘Notes on the Margin of the Black Book.’ Everyone thought I was ‘ruining’ my career as a painter, but Thelma took the long view: She foresaw that ‘Notes’ would become a touchstone of my early career. She was right, of course.”
Over the years, despite persistent rumors that Golden was potentially being tapped to replace MoMA director Glenn Lowry, she has remained true to her vision and her role at the Studio Museum. (Lowry stepped down in September; Christophe Cherix was named as his successor.) Her celebrity and influence have also grown significantly; in 2014, for example, Golden was seated next to President Obama at a White House State dinner. Last year, she was on Time’s 100 list. She is one of the few individuals to have been profiled by The New Yorker twice. She is as much of a name—if not more—in the art world as many of the artists she has mentored and championed, such as Julie Mehretu, Carrie Mae Weems and David Hammons.
“I do think curatorial work is a kind of authorship. I strive to be in conversations with artists.”
Soon, the new building for the Studio Museum will be open, available for the world to experience for themselves. Until now, Golden has relied on her imagination. “A lot of what I do now is stand in those spaces, but imagine them in real use,” she says. “I am standing in the classroom space, imagining two classes in there, having a hands-on workshop with our amazing educators. I’m imagining the galleries with works that have been in our collection for years and works that have come in recently. I’m imagining our public on our beautiful roof and just getting a moment of respite from 125th Street with all of its hustle and bustle.” It can be hard to describe the magic of the curator and museum director—so much of the job is interpersonal, forging connections, pushing everyone and everything else forward—but Golden has her touch.
Hair, Roddi Walters; makeup, Whittany Robinson; production, Partner Films; retouching, May Six.
