The Art World: What If…?!, Season 3, Episode 9 with Thelma Golden
In this episode, Allan Schwartzman sits down with Thelma Golden, director and chief curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem, ahead of the November opening of the museum’s first purpose-built home. Rising seven stories and spanning 82,000 square feet on 125th Street, the new building is rooted in the aspirations and vision of the artists, activists, philanthropists, and Harlem residents who founded the institution in 1968.
One of the most transformative museum leaders of any era, Golden reflects on her career—from groundbreaking exhibitions at the Whitney straight out of college, to the mentors who shaped her, to her 25 years at the Studio Museum. She speaks about leading an institution that is at once hyperlocal and hyperglobal, and about building the structures and spaces that nurture generations of artists, curators, and thinkers.
This new Studio Museum stands a testament to possibility, asking: What if we imagined and created the spaces necessary for art and ideas to truly flourish?
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Find out more about The Art World: What If…?! at schwartzmanand.com/the-art-world.
Photo credit: Julie Skaratt
Transcript:
Charlotte Burns: Hello and welcome to The Art World: What If…?!, the podcast that imagines new and different futures.
[Audio of guests saying “what if?”]
I’m your host, Charlotte Burns, and this time I have the pleasure of introducing a special conversation between Allan Schwartzman and Thelma Golden, the Ford Foundation director and chief curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem.Thelma joins Allan in advance of a milestone event: the November opening of the Studio Museum’s first purpose-built home. The new building rises seven floors and spans 82,000 square feet on 125th Street. It’s been dreamed into reality over half a century, rooted in the aspirations of the artists, activists, philanthropists, and Harlem residents who founded the institution in 1968.
Thelma tells us how she and her team have made this new space a reality, and what it means for artists and audiences alike.
One of the most significant and transformative museum leaders of any era, Thelma reflects on her career, from the groundbreaking exhibitions she organized straight out of college at the Whitney Museum of American Art, to the mentorship that shaped her, to her 25 years at the Studio Museum, the world’s leading institution devoted to visual arts by artists of African descent.
Thelma has cultivated an environment that’s nurtured generations of artists, curators, and thinkers—people who define the legacy of the Studio Museum and who carry its future.
This new building is a testament to the power of the “what if”: what happens when people focus on imagining and creating the necessary spaces for art and ideas to flourish?
Here they are. Thelma and Allan!
[Musical interlude]
Allan Schwartzman: Welcome, Thelma.
Thelma Golden: Hello, Allan.
Allan Schwartzman: Thank you so much for doing this.
Thelma Golden: Thank you for inviting me.
Allan Schwartzman: It's a pleasure and an honor.
Thelma Golden: I'm excited.
Allan Schwartzman: So, I would like to start with what you're about to face, which is the opening of your new building. We're meeting on the eve of the unveiling of the new Studio Museum in Harlem, part of a $300 million capital campaign, which you have surpassed to create the first-ever purpose-built space for the museum.Congratulations!
Thelma Golden: Thank you.
Allan Schwartzman: Let's start with how the museum got here.
Thelma Golden: The way in which you phrase that, thinking about this new institution, it's really about the new building, and the old museum moving into the new building. And I've been holding that very, very close because the Studio Museum was founded in 1968, and I love to believe that our founders had the vision of this moment when they founded it. They had the aspiration for the Studio Museum to be in a fully well executed building, able to meet and greet our communities with the opportunity of fantastic gallery space, new and amazing public program space, places for our education program to really be, and in a building that allowed us to live this incredible life we've had on 125th Street and in Harlem for over a half century.
Allan Schwartzman: Amazing.At the start, what did you see as the most urgent needs for the building, and how has that changed?
Thelma Golden: Well, I mean, the urgent needs for the building let us know what they were. Our former building was built in 1914, and the museum, then under the leadership of the incredible Mary Schmidt Campbell, bought the building in 1979, and we reopened into that space in 1982. And it was renovated and redesigned for the museum by the legendary architect, J. Max Bond.And it's a classic example of adaptive reuse. It had been a bank building that had office spaces above a six-story building. And what Max Bond did was take the public space, the bank space, and make it into our galleries. And we loved those spaces, but they were never meant to be a museum.
And so that, along with the fact that the building was old and over its life, it needed a new roof, and the facade needed work. It often took on water in the basement and through the roof. The HVAC system was well beyond its useful life. And so this project started out of pure practicalities.
Allan Schwartzman: Did you look to other museums for inspiration?
Thelma Golden: Well, of course.I have spent my entire life in museums. My first museum job, so to speak, was in the high school internship program at the Metropolitan Museum [of Art] in the ‘80s. Then, graduating from Smith College, where I majored in Art History and African American Studies, to come to New York and work first at the Studio Museum and then at the Whitney Museum. And so, my entire life has been spent in museums, and certainly from the moment I got to the Studio Museum, I was thinking deeply about how the physical spaces of museums really allow for the life of the museum to thrive.
I don't know if I would say, 25 years ago—this is my 25th year at the Studio Museum in this incarnation—I would've said, “Oh, we're gonna knock down the building and build a new one,” but I certainly was thinking about what ways in which we could transform the space to better serve our work.
Fast forward, once that list that I relayed, once we thought about, “Okay, how do we address that,” it became very clear that starting from scratch was actually the best possibility—the most complicated, the most expensive, the one that has taken nearly what feels like my entire life—but, the option that would get us to where we are, which is with this glorious new purpose-built building for the museum.
Allan Schwartzman: And so what did you start with as a concept? What did you want people to experience when they first walk into the building? Or, let's start with the street. How do you see it relating to the street?
Thelma Golden: Yeah. Well, the brief that we gave the architects had lots of practicalities: the former building didn't have a loading dock, none of the doors were over 10 feet high, the elevator, we couldn't move art in it. There were lots of super practical issues that needed to be addressed, but I added to that brief three experiences of Harlem that I wanted to resonate in this building.The first was the experience of the street, and the street life in Harlem, and the way in which we understand how life is lived very boldly on the street, and we can understand the street as a civic space, a public space, but also a social space, a cultural space, and wanted that experience in the building.
The second experience was of the stage, because we are so proud in Harlem to have so many cultural partners and peers who are performing arts institutions. We are a block east of the Apollo Theater, the cathedral of Black music. And so thinking about the stage, and the place that has had in the way in which African American culture has lived and traveled through the world, was important to think about presentation and centering for us, our presentation—the galleries—in this building.
And the third was the experience of the sanctuary, understanding Harlem as a neighborhood, defined in many ways through the relationships to the many houses of worship across multiple faiths. And the ways in which those spaces function in a spiritual way, but also as civic spaces, and also cultural spaces. Working in Harlem, I can go into many of those spaces for a community meeting, but also for a concert, for a dance performance. I also wanted the way in which the architecture of those spaces invokes an idea of reverence.
So, the street, the stage, and the sanctuary. And the architects added an experience of Harlem, and that was the stoop, that space that takes you from the sidewalk to the house in our sort of brownstone blocks of Harlem.
So, the street, the stage, the sanctuary, and the stoop are experiences that I want our visitors to have when they are in our building.
Allan Schwartzman: So, please tell me a little more about the building. What are some of your favorite spaces?
Thelma Golden: They're all my favorite spaces. You know, the building is really the backdrop for what it means to think about our life as an institution. It gives us spaces to do the work we've done for years and years, but in ways that will truly enhance the experience for our visitors. It gives us the opportunity to scale in many ways and to meet capacity, and it allows us to begin, in many ways, to dream in ways that our former space didn't allow.
Allan Schwartzman: And so, please talk to me more about that dreaming, how the building permits that.
Thelma Golden: Well, it allows us to begin to think about the ways in which the museum can continue to grow. I don't just mean physically, but when I think about the Studio Museum and look at the ways in which the institution, from its founding, has continually grown, evolved, and transformed, it really tells an incredible story, not just about the institution, but the world that it created.One of our opening exhibitions, curated by our amazing curator of the collection, Connie [H.] Choi, is of the work of Tom Lloyd. And Tom Lloyd was an artist who worked in light, sculptor, in the 60s and the 70s, and his exhibition opened our building in September of 1968. This was a bold choice for the Studio Museum of that moment, and here we are in 2025, opening again, but being able to bring this artist back into public view.
And so, it allows us to continue the deep work that has always been at the core of the museum's mission: to present, preserve, interpret, and collect the work of artists of African descent.
But now, with this moment, allowing us to begin to think about a future, it allows us also to think about what might be next for the museum. I don't have an answer for you what that might be, but this moment gives us the absolute inspiration to continue to think about the museum in its next evolution.
Allan Schwartzman: And so what are some of the other things we'll see at the time of the opening?
Thelma Golden: So, also when we open, there'll be a presentation of our collection. We have a permanent collection that has works that begin in the 19th century and go to the present. Its strengths, of course, are late 20th century and the current moment, and we will have a presentation that will be on view for a year, but will change throughout the year. So, people who come and visit us in November when we open, when they come back in January, will see other works from the collection.And what we wanted to do was to create a dynamic dialogue between the work in our collection, which really represents a myriad of voices, ways of working, generations, and to think about that through a thematic lens.
So, we have a collection presentation, and that presentation is accompanied by a collection handbook. So, we publish a volume that presents 300 works from the collection, each interpreted through writing by 300 different curators, scholars, and writers. And that publication will be available when we open.
And so, the combination of these two projects has given us a way to look at the collection anew and to open it up in this form for the opening.
Allan Schwartzman: So, will we be seeing the collection less chronologically and more thematically?
Thelma Golden: It'll be completely thematically throughout the building across several of the galleries in the building.
Allan Schwartzman: Fantastic.Are there particular works that you're especially looking forward to bringing out?
Thelma Golden: Well, I was an intern at the Studio Museum when I was in college. So, in 1985, I was an intern in the communications department at the Studio Museum, and that was the first time I came to know and understand the collection as it existed then.So, there are works that I have a very personal attachment to that I never tire of seeing, classic works in our collection, but we've also been collecting in very, very, very deep ways over these intervening years. And when I think of the 25 years that I've been at the Studio Museum with a generation of curators, the collection also continues to broaden and deepen.
So, I'm excited that we're not only getting to show some of the iconic works in the collection, but works that have never been seen before as they've come to us relatively recently.
Allan Schwartzman: For example?
Thelma Golden: Well, I can't give away…
Allan Schwartzman: Oh, okay.
Thelma Golden: …all the secrets, you know now, Allan, but what I'll say is that there are, I think, for many people, they don't know we have a collection.And for those who do, we've benefited from their incredible generosity because this collection has been built through the generosity of donors who've given us works of art, through artists who have given works of art themselves, or initiated gifts through donors who have given us the chance to raise funds, to be able to buy works and commission works.
And so, this will be a wonderful moment for us to have the collection on view, animating the new building.
[Musical interlude]
Allan Schwartzman: Fantastic.So, let me turn back the clock a little bit and look at your career and what got you to the Studio Museum.
So, straight out of college, you curated two major exhibitions at the Whitney Museum, the 1993 [Whitney] Biennial and Black Male [Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art], both of which have redefined museum practice and art history, but both of which also sparked vitriol at the time, in some reviews.
You avoided the press backlash until Okwui Enwezor asked you to read reviews aloud as a kind of performance around 15 years ago. You've said revisiting those moments over the years has helped you to understand “the depth of commitment we had at the time… that we were deep in the idea that here was a path and if we could open that path, we were opening up not just a biennial, but an art world in a profound way, and certainly my own career…”—this is you speaking— “...and the artists I work with come fully out of that discourse.” And you've made phenomenal changes in what we look at, how we see, and how other museums, particularly some of the most major and mainstream institutions in this country, function.
Thelma Golden: It’s interesting for me, continually, to think back to the nineties and to remember in really profound ways the community of artists, curators, colleagues, critics, even, who formed me and my voice.When I was a college student and then an intern, into the years I was a curatorial assistant at the Whitney, it was made clear to me by so many people that the work that needed to be done needed a path, needed a strategy, required a sense of purpose to make it happen.
And I felt so grateful to have many, many incredible people in this field—too many to name now, but I will name a few—Dr. Mary Schmidt Campbell, Dr. Lowery Stokes Sims, Marcia Tucker, who, among so many more, encouraged my sense of myself and who I could be in this art and culture world. So, it's important to say that, because it wasn't simply that I just got to the Whitney and thought, “Okay, this is what I wanna do.” I knew that I had a purpose.
I also give credit here to David Ross, who was director of the Whitney, who after my time at the Whitney as a curatorial assistant, I left to go work for the incomparable Dr. Kellie Jones, the art historian who at that time was the director of the gallery at the Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning in Queens, doing incredible curatorial projects there. And at that very moment, she was curating the São Paulo Biennial, when it still had national presentations, and Martin Puryear was representing the US, and Kelly asked me if I might come and work with her. She had the opportunity to bring someone on to assist her, and I left the Whitney to do that.
And after working with Kelly and finishing those projects, an opportunity opened at the Whitney because David Ross was becoming director, and we met a few weeks into his tenure, and he asked me in very clear ways what my aspirations for myself were. And he told me a vision of what he thought he would like to do as director of the Whitney. And that led to my coming back to the Whitney in a curatorial position. David also hired Elisabeth Sussman, and Elisabeth asked me to join her, Lisa Phillips, and John Hanhardt in curating the 1993 Biennial.
Now, I think it's important to say—because it makes it so much clearer how deeply significant that felt—when I say that I spent my high school years, ‘81 and ‘83, going to both of those biennials, almost every other day. Could still tell you exactly how those biennials were laid out. When I was an assistant at the Whitney, I worked on the ‘89 Biennial as an assistant.
So, to come back to the Whitney as a curator and to be asked to work on the curatorial team felt deeply, deeply important. In many ways, it was my graduate education. Those were the years when I still thought, “Well, I'll work for a few years in a museum, then I'll take the GREs [Graduate Record Examinations], and then I'll go to grad school. But then Elisabeth asked me to work on the ‘93 Biennial, and in that process, working under the leadership of Elisabeth, but with Lisa Phillips and John Hanhardt, I truly, truly was formed in very important ways as a curator.
It was during the process of the 1993 Biennial that I began to think about what became Black Male, the exhibition. I was deeply impacted by the current moment. I was looking at so much art, because of the 1993 Biennial process, and beginning to want to understand, was there an exhibition I could make that was about race through the lens of conceptual art practice, that also engaged an idea of thinking about the way art could live in a conversation in the world? And that project became Black Male, and Black Male opened in November of ‘94. So in many ways, for me, the period between the 1993 Biennial and Black Male is all just one period for me.
And yes, at the time, the critical dialogue around the show was incredibly strong, shall we say. For a long time, when either of those exhibitions was discussed, or I was discussed, the word “controversial” was somewhere in that dialogue. And what became very clear to me early in that is that I could not engage so deeply in the critical response. Not that I wasn't interested in critique and deep dialogue, right, about art and ideas. That's absolutely my oxygen. But the reviews and the way in which the press took on those exhibitions and my presence in ‘93 Biennial and then Black Male was very personal. And so, in order to keep going and to keep working, I just had to keep some distance from it.
Now, of course, we're talking about a world before the internet, right? I don't know that it would be possible now. But it was important because then I could still be in the world and be in the conversations that those exhibitions opened up. And that also changed me. It made me understand what kind of museum professional I wanted to be. It made me understand the level of proximity that I needed to continually have to audience and the academy. Not either or, but both. It made me also know how present I wanted to be in the space of exhibitions.
Allan Schwartzman: Tellingly, most of the biennials in the 1980s reflected the marketplace. They were echoing what was already being seen in the world. Starting with the ‘93 Biennial and certainly with Black Male, you were establishing a dialogue about what it is that we were to look at, and that would have a profound impact on how we change what we look at, why we look at it, and how we talk about contemporary art.
Thelma Golden: Yes, that's true. And I think that has something to do with the fact that every single day I was at the Whitney as a curator, there was someone outside of the Whitney structure making me understand how important it was that I was there. Sometimes that came with love, sometimes not so much love, but always with the same purpose: to imagine for me what my role could be.And so, what I had to do for myself was to define exactly how I could be most profoundly useful, as I say, for artists, the academy, and audience. And that became the way in which I understood how to work.
Allan Schwartzman: So, today, of course, we live, as you say, in a much different time. We live in a digital time where information is immediately accessible. We live in a more fragmented time and becoming ever more fragmented. Do you still hold the same conviction that exhibitions can be world-changing?
Thelma Golden: I hold the same conviction that art allows us to think and see and imagine in deeply important ways, and that it gives us space that doesn't exist in other places to engage. And I love what that can mean for the individual, and I understand what it can mean for the collective, and it's why I continue to believe so deeply in museums as important civic spaces.
Allan Schwartzman: And what advice do you have for curators today to be equally fearless?
Thelma Golden: I don't know if I'd call what I thought I was doing when I was a young curator being fearless. For some of the time in those early years, I was working with an intensity because I did not know how long that moment would last. And I understood through history how there have been moments, and then sometimes those moments have gone away. So, I looked at every single day I was working as one in which I had to acknowledge that the circumstances of the present might not be the same in the future.And so, what I say to curators now is that it's really important for them, not only to be galvanized by their passion, but to really find their purpose. And I don't think it's the same for all of us as curators, and I think that's what makes the possibility of deep and profound, rigorous work possible.
Allan Schwartzman: I'd like to also go back to early in your career. You wrote in your college application essay that your dream was to be a Whitney curator, and you became the first African American curator there.When you left in 1998, after having sole charge of the 2000 Biennial taken from you, did that feel like the end of a dream? And looking back, was it the start of another one?
Thelma Golden: Well, at that time, I graduated from college in 1987 and was curating a biennial in 1993. My professional dreams were coming true in real time. And when it became clear that I was no longer going to be a curator at the Whitney, of course, my first thought was an incredible amount of grief. But I also acknowledged how much I already had been able to do. And I thought, in that moment, if I am not a curator in a museum again, I will still live with pride for the work that I got to do in that moment.And I did not know what I was going to do next. I was not planning not to be working at the Whitney. And there are some ways, I think, that perhaps, had that not happened, maybe I would still be a curator there today. But in that year, between leaving the Whitney and being asked to join the Studio Museum by Dr. Lowery Stokes Sims—who'd been a friend and a mentor, and now had been appointed to be the new director of the Studio Museum—when Lowery asked me to come and be her chief curator, it was such a full and resounding yes simply because I was going to get the chance to work for and with Lowrey Sims.
But I also said yes because I realized that joining the Studio Museum at that moment, joining as chief curator, was going to allow me to work in ways that I did not get to do when I was at the Whitney, because my life was conditioned by these big exhibitions that existed in a way that, made it not possible to have sometimes the space for what could be a kind of curiosity or taking chances. And when Lowery entrusted me with the curatorial program at the Studio Museum, what I knew was possible allowed me to experiment, and so much of when I look at our program from 2000 to 2005, I see the ways in which I was exploring ideas, artists in ways that perhaps I never would have had that opportunity not come to be.
Allan Schwartzman: Had it been suggested to you that you might be interested in becoming a museum director at some point?
Thelma Golden: I was one of those curators who thought I never wanted to be a museum director. I mean, from where I sat as a curator, that it was not that interesting of a job at all. Obviously, things change, and part of that is because I think that as much as I resisted the idea for a long time, I look back and see how deeply imprinted I was by some fantastic museum directors—Marcia Tucker, Susana Leval, Mary Schmidt Campbell, Kinshasha [Holman] Conwill, Lowery Stokes Sims, and the list goes on. And I think about the ways in which those women showed me so much of what was possible and gave me a real possibility model for myself.When the position opened, when Lowery announced her retirement from the Studio Museum, and the possibility was there for me to become director, I spoke to another beloved mentor, Kathy Halbreich, because I had so much angst as a curator about what would happen to me in becoming a director. And what Kathy made me know is that I would be a director who was a curator, and that there was a lot of power in that. I remember her saying, “Approach every task you were given as director as if you were a curator. Keep your curator mind right in the midst of what it means to think about the institution as a whole.”
And I have to say to you—this is my 20th year as director at the museum—that advice has guided me in very, very specific ways that I know have made it so that I have found so much fulfillment in what it is meant to lead this institution.
Allan Schwartzman: Did you imagine that you would be at the Studio Museum this long? Surely you've been courted for many other positions. And what has kept you at the Studio Museum?
Thelma Golden: I often say if the Studio Museum didn't exist, I think I might have founded it. If there had not been what is the Studio Museum, it would have been in both my head and my heart to create an institution like the Studio Museum and what's kept me at the Studio Museum is the profound opportunity to have both my passion and my purpose enacted at scale in this institution that holds so much history, so much legacy, but also lives very much consistently looking towards the future.
Allan Schwartzman: So, you have said that leadership is “an evolving way to imagine oneself in your full purpose.” Evolving is easier said than done. How do you manage it?
Thelma Golden: I think the way I manage it is staying in the present moment. Often people ask me, “Do you think you would've been at the Studio Museum for 25 years?” Some days it feels like it's been 25 weeks, and other moments feel like I've been at the museum forever. And so, I think the idea of being fully present has made it possible for me to evolve with the institution.
Allan Schwartzman: The mission of the Studio Museum is to be, and this is according to the words of the museum, “a nexus for artists of African descent locally, nationally, and internationally,” and for work that has been inspired and influenced by Black culture. It is a site for the dynamic exchange of ideas about art and society.” You have said that museums need to be “hyperlocal and hyper global, both at the same time.”What specific strategies did you use to expand the profile of the museum nationally, internationally, and digitally, while thinking about what it means to be an institution in and of a place?
Thelma Golden: When I arrived at the museum in 2000 and Lowery implored us as a team to think strategically about the museum's growth, it led me to think about the way we needed to be more explicit in our mission, to acknowledge a reality of the museum's past that wasn't quite understood, and that is from its founding, the Studio Museum had ties to the African diaspora, Caribbean, Latin America, and the continent of Africa itself. There had been exhibitions, projects, artists who exchange, but yet our mission statement and the way we were understood was through the lens of African American culture and history.And even though the evidence was there, that spoke to the institution's sense of itself, always through a global perspective, it felt that that needed to be sharpened. And that's where I went to, and I'm so grateful to, my beloved late brother, colleague, friend, Okwui Enwezor. Because Okwui spent time with me, our curatorial team, and then ultimately also, my board, through a year of structured conversations to come to the ideas and the mission you read. And that was to think about the global African presence. And so, therefore, the Studio Museum in Harlem, as a museum of artists of African descent locally, nationally, and internationally, was the way to acknowledge our commitment to the global Black presence.
But also, our name continually makes us understand our rootedness, our commitment to the community where we have lived and worked since our founding. And that is Harlem. And of course, Harlem is a geography, but Harlem also lives as a broad intellectual idea.
And so, in our work, we continually strive to balance the global presence, which has come through the way in which we've worked with artists and ideas to think about Black culture, Black art in this global form, but also in the ways in which we exist in Harlem and serve our community through our exhibitions, our programs, and make Harlem a part of the way in which we are understood wherever we go, wherever we are.
Allan Schwartzman: In a recent New Yorker profile about your impact on the field, David Ross recalled you as a young curator rejecting token gestures like Black History Month displays, what he called “candy ass projects”. You insisted instead that the museum confront American art history honestly.In the three decades since, how honest a conversation do you think museums have been able to have about American art history, and what still needs to change?
Thelma Golden: I think American museums have shifted in significant ways. I've watched that through my career. But then, when I take on the history that prior to my entrance into this world, we see these waves of change. But it has been cyclical, and it is continually necessary to evolve.I think that what I have experienced in the museum world is a deepening sense of commitment to an understanding that our institutional identities cannot be fixed, right? There is no future in that. However, there still remain spaces in which museums do not acknowledge how they remain closed—physically, intellectually—in ways that are in no way aligned with what our audiences imagine or seek when they are thinking about how they want to engage with culture. And so, I've watched the pendulum. I can think of seismic change that's happened in our field, what's on the walls, who's in the galleries, who's determining what's on the walls, even who's leading institutions. But at the same time, we still exist as a field in which there's still change that needs to happen and codify, not as a moment, an initiative, but as the lived work of institutions.
And I'm proud to say, as someone who's worked in this field, to have incredible relationships with colleagues who have deeply felt the need in their leadership to speak to and voice the necessity of institutional transformation. And that has become a way in which we can think about how museums continue to be important to our institutional lives, to our communities, to the audiences we have, the audiences we seek, and all the ways that we are in the public conversation.
Allan Schwartzman: So many of our museums function as islands within their communities and within their cities. What possibilities do you see for museums collaborating? You certainly have engaged in a number of different collaborations. Maybe you could talk about that and talk about the wider field and what possibilities you see or needs you see.
Thelma Golden: Well, I'm a huge believer in collaboration and partnership and see them somewhat differently. Collaboration allows for the kind of work that might not happen unless multiple parties come to the table.And I think of all the years where we have collaborated, for example, on exhibition projects and others. And this, again, is a wonderful model in the field at large. And I see so much work that happens in this way. The singular idea of the singular institution leading something you know, forward. It also means that sometimes our shared interests don't get played out individually, but we can come together and make them happen collectively.
Partnership, I think, allows for institutions to live within their strengths, but coming together to be stronger in relative ways. And again, the Studio Museum partnership has historically been a way we've worked.
When we embarked on this museum expansion project, there were many challenges, but one was the fact that we were knocking the building down to build a new building, so that we could not stay open to the public during this period. We were losing the museum. And we thought of many different ways to stay engaged and came up with some incredible programs to be able to stay present in our Harlem schools and community organizations. We worked with the AFA, American Federation of the Arts, to travel an exhibition of our collection to many institutions around the country. We began public program partnerships to be able to work with audience in different kinds of spaces and geographies.
But, perhaps most significant, we entered into a partnership with the Museum of Modern Art, where we presented an exhibition each year in the project space on 53rd street, and then also presented our annual artists in residence exhibition at MoMA PS1. And the idea there was that, with those partnerships, our audience would be able to continue to experience some Studio Museum programming, but in these other institutional spaces.
And, of course, our project began in 2014. We closed in 2018. Our MoMA partnership began in 2019, and then we had 2020 and Covid. So, the shutdown of that period paused some of this work, but it then continued.
And so I am thrilled to think about the ways in which we existed as the Studio Museum in Harlem at MoMA and the Studio Museum in Harlem at MoMA PS1, and found that the opportunity for visitors was fantastic. But also fantastic was the way in which our teams worked together and formed interesting alliances to make those projects happen. And we have continued to talk about the ways in which we might continue to work even after we get our building open and have a space of our own.
[Musical interlude]
Allan Schwartzman: While most museum directors opening a new building appear alone in the spotlight, the current cover of Harper's Bazaar shows you in line with 13 Studio Museum alumni, an extraordinary group of people who are now shaping the art world. That choice to center them feels central to your legacy. Who were your models for this collaborative approach, and what have you learned about cultivating the next generation?
Thelma Golden: Well, I think as my career shows, I was deeply mentored, profoundly supported, fiercely loved in ways that made it possible for me to do what I have done. And I think, at any moment when someone compliments my work or thinks about what I do, I want them to understand that it would not have been possible without all of that support.Now I know there's another model in which one can understand their professional development that you know, the “I I I, and I did it”, and I'm sure, some people, that is the case. That was not the case for me. Every step along the way—because I know we share a love for her—I will say that when I went to the Studio Museum as a fellow after college, I also received the fellowship offer from the New Museum, and Marcia told me that I should take the fellowship at the Studio Museum. And I remember at the time someone else, another friend, colleague, read that negatively. They said, “Why is Marcia saying that you should go to the Studio Museum?”
What I even knew then, after my first week in that fellowship, and what I know now as the director of the Studio Museum, is that Marcia knew. What Marcia understood was that I had a role in the Studio Museum, where at the New Museum, that was an amazing model of partnership that I got to work on, The Decade Show [Frameworks of Identity in the 1980s], that was the Studio Museum in Harlem, the New Museum, and what was then the Museum of Contemporary Hispanic Art, which sadly doesn't exist anymore. But what Marcia understood was that, as a young person beginning to think about what I could do, she wanted me to have that as a possibility. And of course it is why I am there today.
And there's so many people who had that role for me, but in singular ways. When I say Dr. Mary Schmidt Campbell, Lowery Stokes Sims, Kynaston McShine.
Kynaston. Kynaston, who I understood deeply and profoundly through his history, which he did not speak about in the kind of narratives that exist today, but told me and taught me important, important lessons that continually guide me.
So, when I think about what I want my own legacy to be, certainly I want it to be that this institution has this new home, but really important to me in its equally significant way, is how my work and life have made it possible for me to get the real privilege to work with so many extraordinary people. And the ability in leadership to be able to make those opportunities possible and to have their vision and their voice at the Studio Museum, but then to have it in the world. Nothing, nothing, fills me with more pride and a sense of gratitude for what I was given that I can offer that.
So, yes, that picture, that was 13 of 30 that, hopefully one day will be 300, right, people who have been and will be a part of what it means to be shaped by the Studio Museum in Harlem.
Allan Schwartzman: Kynaston extended a number of kindnesses toward me, never even seeking to be acknowledged for it, but often it became clear afterwards that he recommended me for things before I ever knew him.
Thelma Golden: Mm-hmm.
Allan Schwartzman: But he was somebody who saw good work and wanted to encourage it, and that he shared very much with Marcia.
Thelma Golden: Yes.And of course, when I was an assistant at the Whitney, I was Richard Armstrong's assistant. But the telephone of those days, Richard Armstrong, Richard [D.] Marshall, and Lisa Phillips's phones all existed on the same sort of rectangular phone, and you push the button for each one, and they were marked R-A, R-M, L-P. And so each of us, an assistant to one of those curators, would cover for each other. So we answered all of the phones.
And, Kynaston would sometimes call Richard Marshall. And I would answer the telephone, and it would be Kynaston, and of course, if Richard wasn't there, he'd have some message. And all the while, like I wanted to say so many things and I never did. I simply answered the phone, “Curatorial department, Richard Marshall's office, Thelma speaking. How can I help you?” But I wanted to tell him so, so, so many things, and I didn't. And it wasn't until a few years later, one evening at the Odeon, and Barbara Gladstone introduced us in a formal and proper way. She knew what that would mean to me.
And it was from that moment that then Kynaston and I began what was a friendship that was bound around dates sometimes to see things, or a lunch, or a telephone call. He watched what I was doing, made me know when he did not agree, but would express pride even in the moments where sometimes it might be something that he wouldn't necessarily have done himself. We were able to, in many ways, reconcile what, for me, it meant to understand the paths of others before I was really on that path myself and I hold so deeply, the legacy of people like Kynaston, with me because it shaped me.
Allan Schwartzman: There's a real power to having been mentored and inspired by people who were the ‘60s generation, because this was a generation that understood the power of change and how a generation could fundamentally change the way a population exists.
Thelma Golden: Yes.
Allan Schwartzman: I mean, I worked at the Whitney, that was my first job.
Thelma Golden: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Allan Schwartzman: And I had that similar phone bank.
Thelma Golden: Yes. Yes!
Allan Schwartzman: I was working for Marcia Tucker before she had been on vacation.
Thelma Golden: Mm-hmm.
Allan Schwartzman: And then several months later, when she was released from the Whitney, she decided she would start the New Museum. She said she never wanted to be fired again, so she would start a museum and asked if I would join her. And I asked her, “What was it that made you want to bring me along?”, because she was amazing at empowering people, way ahead of their experience to fulfill the work that she empowered them to do. And I said, “What gave you that confidence?” And she said, “It was the way you answered the phone.” [Laughs]
Thelma Golden: Listen, it means so much. I think about how much I learned from answering those telephones, in a pre-email era, like messages, which were basically emails. And it was my responsibility to be able to take that message.And there are many people, sadly, many are not with us anymore, in this art world now who I answered the phone for and to, for years. And, I think what I learned in those moments was about the ways in which this world works. And that also gave me a sense of being able to understand, okay, so how do I want to work in this world? Who do I want to be?
Allan Schwartzman: Have you thought about what strategies it may take to ensure that the next generation of museum leaders continues this transformation?
Thelma Golden: I think it's going to require a rethinking of how our institutions are structured. I think as we consider what it means to run museums, the resources necessary, quite often, that has meant, appropriately, a way that has taken away some of the opportunities that used to be possible for young people to take these broad jumps the way we did, right?Because the stakes now feel very high. The field has professionalized. And again, for necessary reasons. So, I think institutions are going to have to build in what it means to continue to be a space of opportunity to engage young people into the field with a sense of what they can be and what they can do.
Allan Schwartzman: I've been thinking a lot about this. When I look from a market perspective, which is my current perch, I see that too much fat was formed in an age of plenty. And that we misunderstood, we took on the notion of continual growth as a value. And the idea that you apply a corporate principle to culture can actually be very damaging. And I think it's part of what has gotten us to a place where a museum director's job is forever fundraising, where boards function the way they have built corporations, and that's often challenged the idea that curators have the opportunity to experiment, that they see what they do as not having to always be “successful”.Thelma Golden: No, I think you accurately describe the moment though, I do think that era of plenty was not an era of plenty for all kinds of institutions. Coming out of an institutional structure that had always existed undercapitalized, right, learning how to always work with less—less money, less people, less space. And when you look across the city, most arts institutions exist in this space.
And so, I think, in this moment, what I hope for, and I hope what our growth will show is a possibility for what it means to grow without overscaling. What it means to think about being sustainable. This capital campaign at the Studio Museum is giving us our first endowment ever in our history. So, to begin to imagine what it means to be able to think about the future, because of some of what has happened in this moment, as we have thought about what it means, not just to build the physical building, but to build the institution itself.
Allan Schwartzman: The new building opens amid political upheaval and backlash against diversity, when open, thoughtful conversation about complex issues feels more thwarted than ever. How are you in the Studio Museum navigating this while staying true to your mission? How do you see this shaping the museum's role in the years ahead?
Thelma Golden: I've been looking back a lot to our founding moment because in 1968 our founders were opening an institution in a differently, but equally complex time. And I think, when you think about the Studio Museum, some of our other cultural peers that were founded at that moment in Harlem—the Dance Theatre of Harlem, the National Black Theatre—when I think about the ways in which Black institutions broadly, have had to make space for what it means to live with ideas of how we acknowledge the past, but how we are also part of this movement towards change in the future. And I think that's how we enter back into this world today, with the inspiration that we get from our founders.
Allan Schwartzman: You have said that the museum was founded, and you always want to work towards “what is needed and what is necessary”. What do you think is needed and necessary now for the field at large?
Thelma Golden: I think what's needed and necessary for the field is the ability to continue to work in ways that allow us the most breadth and the most depth of presentation. And to be able to do that with a sense of rigor, offering, for our audiences, experiences that inspire, galvanise, and transform.
Allan Schwartzman: Are you concerned about the government repealing nonprofit tax codes?
Thelma Golden: I’m concerned about everything, Allan. I'm concerned about everything and I, like so many, are living in the world with a deep sense of the contradiction of holding all this joy about what's happening at the Studio Museum, in the midst of grief and horror about what's happening in the world.
Allan Schwartzman: Last year, the museum announced an annual six-month program called Arts Leadership Praxis, which provides professional development and cohort-building opportunities to cultural professionals of color. It is in its second year. What can you tell us about your hopes for this and what you see happening?
Thelma Golden: Praxis is a formalization of what has been a practice of the museum in my entire moment there. And it really began in a formal way a year before Okwui Enwezor’s Venice Biennale was opening.And, at that time, Okwui gave a talk with Thomas Hirschhorn. It was a Dia [Art Foundation] project up in the Bronx. And I invited a group of young curators, some Studio Museum curators, others who worked elsewhere, to go with me to hear Okwui because I thought that would be an important experience for them. And later that evening at dinner, Okwui said to me he was so excited to see them. They were of course thrilled to get the chance to engage with him. And he said, “Thelma, wouldn't it be something if they could all be in Venice for the opening of my biennale, so that when they are, 25 years later, they can say, “Yes. I was at that opening.” And I began to raise some money and created a travel grant program for curators of color who did not work at the Studio Museum to join the Studio Museum curators, myself and our donor trip, on a trip to the biennale.
And that fundraising effort made me understand that there was a very tangible way that I could support curators who did not work at the museum, but offering them some of the opportunities that I hoped would further their growth. That led to also creating opportunities for them to meet other museum professionals, and then individually, it just meant being open to them when they called for advice.
In the weeks after George Floyd's murder, a group of these curators called me as they were grappling, right, with the world, their roles, their institutions, their jobs. And when I got off of a Zoom with them, it became clear to me that they all were going to require deep support, as I felt I did, right, in that period. And very quickly, with an incredibly generous grant from the Ford Foundation, followed by a generous grant from the [Andrew W.] Mellon Foundation and a call to [Elizabeth] Buffy Easton, the founder and director of the Center for Curatorial Leadership, we began a program that existed in Covid on Zoom for a group of emerging curators to allow them space to further their own professional aspirations.
And, at the end of that program, it became clear to me that this needed to be formalized at the Studio Museum. And that's what prompted Praxis as a fully formed program, part of what we do at the museum, but an extension of what began with that first trip to Venice, when Okwui curated the biennale.
Allan Schwartzman: Covid taught us a lot on how to function.
Thelma Golden: Mm-hmm.
Allan Schwartzman: The museum has surpassed its $300m capital campaign. Are you raising the institution's goals?
Thelma Golden: Of course. I am still raising money. Of course.The capital campaign allowed us to build the building, to start an endowment, to pay for costs while we were out of the building. But I continue to raise money so that we can continue to make our exhibitions, our collection, our learning and engagement programs flourish.
So, still raising money, but really, really grateful to the generosity that has gotten us to $302 million.
Allan Schwartzman: What have been your greatest moments of doubt, and who do you turn to at these moments of uncertainty?
Thelma Golden: Oh, I've had so many moments of doubt. I don't know that I can name one. If you said, what was your greatest moment of doubt yesterday, right…[Laughter]
But—but, I look at doubt as a way to test my intuition. Really. I'm not afraid of doubt. I operate deeply from a sense of thought and logic, but it is bound against a lot of deep feeling.
The person I go to the most, I would say, when I have doubt is the artist Glenn Ligon, who has been a deeply profound interlocutor about all things for me since we met back in the late ‘80s.
Allan Schwartzman: And what about your greatest moments of joy?
Thelma Golden: I can't say that there is a singular moment of joy because there are so many. What I know will be a moment of joy is when the doors of the Studio Museum are open and we are again welcoming visitors back into the museum.Allan Schwartzman: Do you miss curating?
Thelma Golden: I miss curating, but I have made myself think about what Kathy Halbreich told me, and I think of the work that I'm doing now as being a part of my curatorial practice.I mean, I’ve always thought of myself as someone, when I think about what I do and what I've done, it's been about making space, making space for artists, making space for ideas. Now it is physically making space for the institution. And I hope that my feeling about what it means to be a curator has translated so profoundly into this work that it will make it so that I don't feel that I haven't curated exhibitions.
Now also, in our partnership with the Museum of Modern Art, when Glenn Lowry made the offer for us to be there, I immediately thought of what a great opportunity this was going to be for a range of curators to work on the project series, as well as the Artist-in-Residence exhibition. Glenn asked me very specifically if I would consider curating. So, in a way, that brought me out of retirement. But I was able, with each of those projects, to partner with a fabulous curatorial voice.
So, I did feel as though I was curating, I also was working in collaboration as a curator, which I love.
Allan Schwartzman: What advice would you give your younger self?
Thelma Golden: The advice I would give my younger self is to realize that each and every one of these moments will change and shift, but there's a lot of power in that.
[Musical interlude]
Allan Schwartzman: So, we call the series “What If…?!”
Thelma Golden: Mm-hmm.
Allan Schwartzman: So, we always end each discussion with a few ‘what ifs’. What is the ‘what if’ that keeps you up at night?
Thelma Golden: What if we lose the opportunity in our culture world to continue to allow for new institutions’ ideas to grow?
Allan Schwartzman: And what is the ‘what if’ that motivates you to get up in the morning?
Thelma Golden: The ‘what if’ that motivates me to get up in the morning is the idea that there's art and ideas out there that will not be seen if we do not make the space and the place for that to happen.
Allan Schwartzman: Thelma, thank you so much for your time and for your thoughts. And congratulations.
Thelma Golden: Thank you, Allan. Thank you so much for having me, and thank you so much for your enthusiasm for all that we do at the Studio Museum in Harlem. I appreciate that.
Allan Schwartzman: It's a pleasure and a thrill.[Musical interlude]
Charlotte Burns: My huge thanks both to Allan and Thelma.Join us next time when Allan and I look back through the season and talk about everything that’s happened and what’s coming next.
Allan Schwartzman: There’s big thinking on the part of museum directors at major institutions, like Glenn at MoMA, Michael Govan at LACMA, and there’s big thinking amongst voices that have not been at the center of Western communication but in fact have dealt with these critical juncture points between Western culture and African culture. And what’s really important is that big thinking, wherever it’s coming from, needs to be shared in ways that can then reach other institutions because culture is threatened. And the support for it in this country in particular is fragile.
Charlotte Burns: Can’t wait for you to join us.
This podcast is brought to you by Art&, the editorial platform created by Schwartzman& and executive produced by Allan Schwartzman. The series is produced by Studio Burns with audio design by Tamsyn Kent and production support by Julia Hernandez. Follow the show on social media @schwartzman.art.