Thelma Golden on the Studio Museum in Harlem’s Bold New Chapter

Five feet tall and pulsing with energy, Thelma Golden, who turns 60 this September, is as diminutive and dynamic as an exclamation point. Since 2005, she has been the director and chief curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem, where, in late July, a few months before the inauguration of the institution’s glamorous new building, she was perched on the stepped wooden seating of the lower-level auditorium while a technician tested the electrical systems. “We are now at the point where we are turning on the digital signage and lights, the sensors that open and close doors,” she said. She was eagerly anticipating the galvanizing jolt that would come in a few months. “I have missed what it means to have a museum that is open to the public.”

Since 1968, the Studio Museum has been a beacon for the arts in Harlem. Originally occupying rented space, it moved in 1982 to a former bank on 125th Street, the neighborhood’s main thoroughfare. In 2018, the building closed its doors so it could be demolished and replaced by a modernist showplace designed by Adjaye Associates; Golden led a capital campaign that raised more than $300 million for construction and maintenance.

Golden majored in art history and African American studies at Smith College, and she has seamlessly combined the two fields in her career. Early on, as a curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, she collaborated on a confrontational biennial in 1993 that put a spotlight on identity politics. (The tone was set by a piece by Daniel Joseph Martinez in which visitors were given buttons bearing various parts of the sentence “I can’t imagine ever wanting to be white.”) The next year, she organized a storied and still controversial exhibition, “Black Male,” centered on depictions of African American masculinity. After she arrived at the Studio Museum as deputy director, in 2000, she was responsible for another pivotal show, “Freestyle,” which highlighted younger artists whom she described memorably (and, once again, controversially) as “post-Black.”

Because championing artists of color is Golden’s calling, the Studio Museum has been a perfect fit for her. In the two decades that she has been at its helm, Black artists in America have moved from the periphery into the mainstream; the museum now owns nearly 9,000 works, which have consistently appreciated in value. Golden stresses that although the museum’s home may be new, its mission of support remains unchanged. Emphasizing that continuity, the first show in the revamped space presents the work of the artist who was the subject of the Studio Museum’s inaugural show, in 1968: Tom Lloyd, who is best known for his abstract sculptures of blinking electric lights. A rotating selection of pieces from the permanent collection, along with archival material, will also be on view, taking advantage of a more than 50 percent increase in exhibition space.

Another nod to tradition is a show that honors the museum’s famed artist-in-residence program, which was conceived by the abstract painter William T. Williams on the institution’s founding. Every year, it provides three emerging artists with a workspace, a stipend (currently $37,500), and a year-end exhibition. For the opening, Golden, along with assistant curator Yelena Keller, commissioned more than 100 works on paper made by alumni of the program. “At the museum’s center is the studio, which is in our name,” said Golden. “In the old building, my office was under the studios. I can go through the years and remember how the artists’ soundtracks were different. The joy of my life is having artists in these studios, seeing things in process, and getting to the end of the year and the finished works.” The alumni roster includes many of the prominent Black artists of our time, such as Sanford Biggers, Chakaia Booker, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, David Hammons, Kerry James Marshall, Wangechi Mutu, Tschabalala Self, Mickalene Thomas, and Nari Ward. “Knowing that you will have three artists living here, as perhaps the only constant, has impacted the way we have developed,” said Keller, who oversees the program.

One of the main gifts bestowed upon the participants is Harlem itself. At least since the Harlem Renaissance, a century ago, the district has been a world-famous epicenter of Black culture. “There are certain artists for whom Harlem is so fascinating that they’re spending more of their time outside of the building and in this community,” said Golden. They often make lasting connections. Jordan Casteel, a figurative painter, had a residency from 2015 to 2016 and portrayed many of her neighbors. (She then received a solo exhibition at the New Museum in 2020.) “I see one of her subjects quite often, and he refers to this as ‘Jordan’s museum,’ and I never correct him,” said Golden. “Because he’s right. In his mind, it is. And Julie Mehretu [the acclaimed Ethiopian American painter, an artist in residence from 2000 to 2001 and the subject of a Whitney Museum retrospective in 2021] is still uptown. I think back to her residency moment and understand what it meant for her to be here.”

The Los Angeles–based artist Lauren Halsey, whose Egyptian-themed installation was the rooftop commission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2023, was a resident from 2014 to 2015. She was smitten with Harlem, which she had visited only once before. “I engaged with so many smart, fun, idiosyncratic people on 125th Street,” she said. Among other realizations, she discovered that she wasn’t the only Black person fascinated by ancient Egypt: “I would see a vendor selling T-shirts mocking up an obelisk, or someone who had pyramids as paperweights.”

Young artists also find supportive eyes and ears. First, there are the two colleagues working in close proximity in the studios. In addition, graduates volunteer to mentor their successors. Halsey was helped by the sculptor Simone Leigh, who had been in the program a few years before her. “I went to her studio and asked if there were dynamics I should be aware of, what she thought of my work, how best I could use the program,” recalled Halsey. “I left incredibly energized and felt, Wow, if I work hard, I can have a career as an artist.”

The series that Halsey completed during her stay proved to be a turning point in her ongoing project to create a park, which she is still completing, on her home turf of South Central Los Angeles. One of her signature practices now is the incision of drawings in gypsum board. “I had engaged with carving when I was in high school, and I picked it up again at the Studio Museum,” she said. “People come in and apply with examples of work,” explained Golden. “I have seen how getting here gives them the freedom to try something different, which might even be in opposition to what they were doing before. Sometimes that becomes the way they are understood in the world.” The opportunity is best suited for those who are at an inflection point: “They know they are artists, but they haven’t worked for so long that they have made their choices.”

Qualeasha Wood, whose medium is textiles, was in residence from 2021 to 2022. “There is an emphasis on slowing down,” she said. “That slowness allowed me to focus on what I was doing.” Wood gleans the subject matter in her pieces from the Internet, and she began incorporating more texts and browser interfaces during that time. “I was taking a lot more risks. I was showing my experiences online more directly.” Aside from giving her more mental space, the Studio Museum gave her physical room. “Having a 15-foot wall, I could make a 12-foot-long piece, which I had never done before,” she said. “Up till then, every tapestry I made was in a corner of my bedroom.”

But perhaps the most valuable aspect of Wood’s residency was the knowledge that she was not in the minority. “Everywhere else in the art world, you feel your Blackness when you show up, and you have the preparatory thing of having to explain things,” she said. “It’s nice to have a level of understanding and sameness. I can make art that is literally about me and my experience. I don’t have to stay on that trauma that can be the selling point for some people.”

The new building will refresh and expand the institution’s physical capabilities with a fourth-floor partitioned studio space, graced by an expansive northern view. But for the people closest to the program, its importance is less material than psychological, or even spiritual. It epitomizes the feeling of camaraderie that the Studio Museum engenders. “What we do is bring the artists into a community, and for many that community continues to support them throughout their careers,” said Golden.

The experience of spending time there can be transformative. “I do a lot of museum work, and I think it started because I was embedded in one for a year,” said Saya Woolfalk, who was an artist in residence from 2007 to 2008, and whose exhibition “Empathic Universe,” of futuristic plantlike women, was shown at the Museum of Arts and Design a few months ago. “When I got to the Studio Museum in Harlem, I was completely heard. It was my first experience in the art world that felt right. It’s not only a museum; it really is a community. The building is just a physical manifestation of that.”

Hair and makeup by Shaina Ehrlich for 111Skin at Born Artists. Photo Assistants: Mingus Murray, Chris Cook; Digital Technician: Chris Cook; Fashion Assistant: Kayla Perno.

All artworks and contact sheet Courtesy of Studio Museum in Harlem.