“Ultimately what I’m doing is thinking out loud,” Thelma Golden, director and chief curator of the world-renowned Studio Museum in Harlem, introduced her 90-minute talk to a near-capacity crowd at The Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis last Wednesday.
She discussed her career, the history of the iconic arts organization she is charged with leading, and the past, present and future of art as it relates to the black experience.
“My first year of working at the Whitney Museum of American Art, I had the occasion of being introduced to someone who is now a very famous well-known African-American actor,” Golden said.
“At the time he wasn’t well known, and neither was I. A seminal writer introduced us, and when he introduced us he introduced me as a curator. This then-unknown actor said, ‘What the heck is that?’ – that’s not how he said it; he said it in a much more colorful way. And it really spurred me to spend my career to figure that out. What does it mean to be a curator, to be invested in the presentation of artwork?”
Since, she has been appointed by President Barack Obama as a member of the Committee to Aid in the Preservation of The White House – literally, as in preserving the objects in the White House and its physical structures. But she chose her beloved Studio Museum in Harlem as the crux of her conversation at The Contemporary.
“Our life began very modestly in a small, rented, second-floor space on 5th Avenue between 125th and 126th,” Golden said of the museum’s 1968 inception. “We were created by a multicultural group of supporters that felt Harlem needed a museum, deserved a museum, and who were interested in the role artists could play in the dialogue of community reinvention.”
Nearly five decades later, the Studio Museum in Harlem boasts 2,400 pieces that range from the 19th century to the present featuring works from artists of African descent.
“The Studio Museum in Harlem began with the radical idea that African-American artists were not adequately or appropriately invested in the history of American art,” Golden said.
She began her presentation of the museum’s history with a visual of Romare Bearden’s “Uptown Looking Downtown,” paying homage to his pivotal role in breathing life into the idea that would become The Studio Museum in Harlem. But Golden said that Jacob Lawrence’s “The Architect,” also one of the museum’s early acquisitions, is the most profound piece in the museum’s continuously growing collection.
“The Architect,” she said, is “so symbolic of the initial founding of who we were, creating something, building something, designing it and defining it and making it in the image of the community.”
She then spoke of an exhibit where she issued architects with the charge of developing blueprints of the residential possibilities within post-gentrification Harlem.
Reparations Towers was one of the results. The mockup included a glass building in the shape of a clenched Black Power fist. The artist used his space to create a model apartment and even took out a classified ad in the real estate section of the New York Times to preview the art show, seeking potential residents of the upper, upper, upper West side as “early gentrifiers.”
“People came imagining that this was a real possibility,” Golden said. “Artists can drive these conversations into places that really open up the big spaces that still need to be explored.”
She spoke of the radicalism and strength that imbue The Studio Art Museum in Harlem, a multi-generational love child of the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement.
“It indicated a type of power: power in the art world, power in the cultural world, power with defining what art is and who has the power to say what it is going to be,” Golden said.
“When you look at ‘Uptown Looking Downtown,’ it is a work created at the time the museum was founded – one that defines in so many ways this idea of an institution rooted where it is but already thinking of itself out in the world, imagining the impact it could have for black artists in the world.”
