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Anita Hill speaks with Thelma Golden, Director and Chief Curator of The Studio Museum in Harlem, about the roles space and representation play in achieving equality and how museums are being reinvented to reflect diverse artists and audiences.
Anita Hill
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Thelma Golden
I think of my role as a curator, as a kind of interlocutor between artists, their objects and the audience.
Anita Hill
That's Thelma Golden, the director and chief curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem. She's been at the helm of hundreds of exhibits and throughout her decades long career, Golden has been committed to the work of artists of African descent.
Thelma Golden
I think of the exhibition is what surfaces to the public, but the work has been what it means to be in collaboration, what it means to be in communion with artists.
Anita Hill
Golden sees art as essential to community and to culture.
Thelma Golden
Visual art can create for us this incredible space of wonder. I think that the space of art in museums allows also, the space for conversations that perhaps don't happen in other places. The space of art gives us the chance to engage with each other around ideas through artwork.
Anita Hill
I'm Anita Hill. This is Getting Even, my podcast about equality and what it takes to get there. On Getting Even, I speak with people who are improving our imperfect world, people who took risks and broke the rules. In this episode, Thelma Golden and I discussed the role of a curator, her journey to becoming one and how she currently approaches her work at the Studio Museum in Harlem.
I just want to start out by saying that in 2017, 18 in Venice, it was a wonderful moment that stands out for me. I'm sure that people didn't expect me to be at the Venice Biennale, but they absolutely expect that you would be at the Venice Biennale, of course you would be. What stands out so much for me was that you belong there. This is your space. You have created your role in it. Everyone knows it and they respect it. Even at my age, it's important to be able to see that and to experience it. Honestly, by experiencing your comfort there, your sense of belonging there and your presence and knowing what you've done, I felt more comfortable.
Thelma Golden
Thank you. I am very humbled to be in this conversation with you. I'm so grateful for your comments because they really speak to not only what I aspire to as a young person when I imagined myself entering the museum world, when I thought about what it would mean to have a life and a career in and of the art, but also what it is meant to continue to do this work and to show up for this work every day.
Anita Hill
That's amazing. Let's start with talking about your relationship with the art world starting at an early age for you, right?
Thelma Golden
Yeah. Started at a very early age through what I think for so many of us can always be an important lever in our lives. That is the introduction, not just to art, but to the idea of the history of art that was introduced to me by a teacher when I was in fifth grade. To that point, like many children, I enjoyed what it meant to make, to put my hands into something and create. I grew up with a mother who was deeply creative, a mother who could sew, who cooked, who decorated. I understood the sort of the power and pleasure of creativity, but to be introduced to the history of art and to understand that that history contained the histories of our cultures, of our countries, of people, was fascinating to me.
It was made very possible by my parents who then supported my desire to go to museums. I grew up in New York City and my parents were deeply involved in the cultural world, but their cultural interest was theater and music. Then it was also made possible by the librarians at the Queensborough Public Library who allowed me at a very young age, they'd lift those big large art books off the shelf of the art section and let me sit there and look at them. This was all sort of created in me very, very early in my life.
Anita Hill
You say it was created in you, but it was also something maybe that was intuitive that was there internally in you. Do you ever think that?
Thelma Golden
You are right. It was perhaps cultivated and nurtured by the adults around me that the possibility then when I got to college to begin to express this sense of what I would do in the world, it seemed that there was actually nothing else I imagined that I would do.
Anita Hill
When specifically, did you first imagine that you would actually work in a museum?
Thelma Golden
Well, I put it into the world when I was applying to college. In my college application essay, I stated that I wanted to be a contemporary art curator. I think that was the moment when I began to say it. Through my college years, I was an art history and African-American studies double major at Smith College. During those years studying in those two disciplines, I had many, many internships. The most significant internship that I had was in 1985. I was an intern at the Studio Museum in Harlem, and that internship shaped me. It seems somewhat telling the story now, it always feels like, well then of course, you are director of the studio museum now, but no, I mean that internship really created for me a path. It gave me this sense of who I could be in the art museum world, how I could be in the art museum world, and it was transformative.
Anita Hill
I'm just curious about the idea that you said you put in your application that you wanted to be a curator. Did you know exactly what the job of a curator was at that time?
Thelma Golden
I did, but here's why I knew, I knew what a curator was because I had the amazing experience of being a high school intern at the Metropolitan Museum working in a curatorial department. I came to know very generally about the job, but more specifically because as I say this, this interest was really encouraged by my parents. My father shared with me a picture of a curator who was a curator at that time at the Metropolitan Museum, and her picture was in a magazine and her name was Lowery Stokes Sims, and Lowery was the first African American curator of modern and contemporary art at the Metropolitan. When she entered the Met in 1972 before being appointed to be director of the Studio Museum in Harlem in 2000. She is seen as a pioneer in the art in the museum world. My whole time as a high school student at the Met, my hope was that I was going to run into Lowery Stokes Sims, just walking through the halls. That did not happen, but when I was in college and had the chance to be connected with her and meet her, she became instantly moved from just being this inspiration out in the world, but became a mentor, a friend, and then I went on to work for her in 2000 when I came to the Studio Museum.
Anita Hill
Did you understand the power of a curator, the power of the act of curating art? If so, how did you understand it and how do you understand it today?
Thelma Golden
I came to understand the power of curating when I was an intern at the Studio Museum, because I came to understand the institution and its history, and the way in which the institution through its exhibitions and its collection had changed art history. It had opened the cannon so that the histories, the lives, the visions and the voices of black artists would be documented. I understood how important this act was to create narrative through artworks, through objects, and through the voice of artists into creating what would be full and rich and diverse art histories. It continued to make me understand the role that institutions and individuals in institutions have in not only creating this opportunity for us in the present, but how important curatorial work in the present is to futures that have yet to be created.
Anita Hill
I think so many of us who come from the humanities think of creating narratives as coming from literature, but you understood it as not only coming from art itself, but also coming from the way art is presented.
Thelma Golden
Yes.
Anita Hill
I think that's really a powerful message to take in that just seems so clear to me that this was the work that you were destined to do, that you're supposed to be doing, and it feels like that today.
Thelma Golden
Look, I have worked on lots of exhibition, but exhibition making for me as a curator is really been just one part of the work because I think of the exhibition as what surfaces to the public, but the work has been what it means to be in collaboration, what it means to be in communion with artists. Sometimes that doesn't always surface into an exhibition, but I see that really as the core of my work.
Anita Hill
That is one of the things that stands out about you and your work, but I do want to think about your memory of the various exhibitions. Can you tell us when you really feel that an exhibition that you curated actually reflected your vision for art?
Thelma Golden
I have to say that I believe that every exhibition I've made has reflected my vision for art. As a curator, I often see my exhibitions existing in a particular moment. I've often said sometimes exhibitions are the way to ask and answer questions. For me, those questions in particular continue to change and evolve, so that I'm always entering into curating with the same core principles, but the nature of what it means to think through objects and through artists has changed for me over the course of my career.
Anita Hill
You focus on not only what the audience is viewing, but also, you focus on the artists and can you say more about how your focus is on the artist who you've worked with?
Thelma Golden
I think of my role as a curator, as a kind of interlocutor between artists, their objects and the audience. I think that when I am operating at my best in this role, that actually my role is the least significant in that equation. It is the one that though is creating the opportunity for the conversation between an artist, their objects and ideas and the audience itself. Now, not every artist I've worked with is living, but I kind of carry that same sensibility even when I'm working with an artist that I don't have the opportunity to have the kind of conversation with. Most of my work has been with living artists and it really has been about how can I be in service to creating an intellectual space, a physical space in the form of an exhibition for their work, for their voice, for their vision.
Anita Hill
It seems to me that you also see the art that you work with as having the possibility of shaping culture. How does that play in then to the way it's exhibited?
Thelma Golden
I think that art, the arts broadly, but visual art specifically provides the opportunity for us to, as audience members, to have many different kinds of experiences. It can be an experience of inspiration. Visual art can create for us this incredible space of wonder. It can be a space of instigation, works of art, can allow us to think about the world in different ways, seeing it through the vision of artists. I think that the space of art in museums allows also, the space for conversations that perhaps don't happen in other places. The space of art gives us the chance to engage with each other around ideas, through artwork.
Anita Hill
After the break, Thelma Golden and I discuss the importance of art in the black community and how essential museums are to representation and inspiration.
You are listening to Getting Even. I'm Anita Hill, I'm speaking with Thelma Golden, director and chief curator of the Studio Museum about her storied career. We also talk about how museums are being reinvented to reflect diverse artists and audiences.
Can you give us an example of one of your exhibits that really did bring about a different conversation or shift the narrative about the way the world operates or at least encourage people to ask different questions?
Thelma Golden
There are so many different ways I could answer that question. It's such a good one, and I think I'll go back to my beginnings and perhaps this is why this is remaining so important to me.
Anita Hill
It's important to know how you got there. What was the very first exhibit that you curated and where was that?
Thelma Golden
The first fully conceived group exhibition I made was the exhibition I curated in 1994, which had the title Blackmail, Representations of Masculinity and Contemporary American Art, so '93, '94, that moment. The Blackmail exhibition was deeply inspired by the artworks by artists who were looking at the image of black masculinity as it was portrayed in popular culture and media. That moment was so defined by the confirmation hearings, by the Simpson trial, by Rodney King, and the exhibition existed in the public's imagination sort of attached to high level of controversy. The way in which I saw that exhibition is that it existed within a high level of conversation because it was an exhibition about representation, the history of representation, how it existed in our art and art historical worlds, but also, how it lived in popular culture. It was an exhibition that had a range of artists cross generation, but was existing in a moment, which continues, where this was also existing in the world. For me, that sort of formed me and formed my sense of how I wanted to exist as a curator in the world.
Anita Hill
In many cases I would suspect for that exhibit, the conversation involved lots of tensions and lots of contradictions.
Thelma Golden
Of course, it did because life includes that, but in the space of an exhibition, in the space of the kind of narrative an exhibition creates, there was the possibility to wrestle with those contradictions, to be in the kind of conversation that could open up space for new ideas and ways of seeing. I really do believe in that way that of thinking about this sort of space where we can engage as a community in the sort of deep thinking about who we are, what we are, what makes us human, how we see each other, how we understand each other.
Anita Hill
You curated that exhibit while you were at the Whitney Museum, but ultimately, you left the Whitney and you moved uptown back to the Studio Museum. What was your calculus when you made that decision?
Thelma Golden
Yes, it was quite a moment of personal investigation and personal reckoning. Even in my own family, my parents had very different views of this move. It was interesting to me that my parents did not agree. One of them thought very specifically that because I'd been at the Whitney for over a decade and was the first African American curator there that I was a path breaker, that I should continue that within an institution that lived within that sense of power and privilege and history. My other parent felt the opposite. My other parent felt that I had been educated from kindergarten all the way through college in prestigious, mainstream institutions that lived within this sense of power and privilege. Yes, I had had this incredible experience at the Whitney, but the reality was that my job at the Whitney ended, I was no longer at the Whitney.
I was considering what my next step would be and when the call came that let me know that Lowery Stokes Sims was being appointed to be the director of the Studio Museum and was interested in a conversation with me to be her chief curator, that is all I needed, right? The idea of what it would mean to work for Lowery, to work with Lowery at an institution that not only was incredibly important to me, that early internship experience, but also, to do it with Lowery at a moment, which potentially as we discussed what could be, could begin to imagine the museum at the next phase of its life. Here we are in 2022 and I am celebrating my 22nd year at the museum and I am so proud of that and feel privileged to have had this experience.
Anita Hill
It sounds like you are excited about not only what you went into but where it has grown, where the Studio Museum has grown as the world's leading institution devoted to the visual art by artists of African descent. I don't think it's by chance that the Studio Museum is in Harlem. Was it important for you to be in the Harlem community in doing your work there?
Thelma Golden
Well, it was important to me to be in an institution that formed itself around an idea of art, an artist. That's why the studio in our name comes from, that was created in a radical revisioning of what museum could be in our name, but cited itself in the Harlem community in the present of our founding, but also look back to the past of Harlem when we were founded. Also, I believe that those who were involved in the creation of the Studio Museum were also making a stake into the future that exists for us now.
Anita Hill
It seems to me that what you're talking about in terms of this space and the Studio Museum was about was a revision of what museums can be and what they need it to be for the future. I don't think that everyone has learned the lesson because I think even today what we have, and certainly historically, museums have been oppressively white spaces. Where you visit it and you see things on the wall, you don't see the artist, you see the art. You may find out a few things about the artist, but the primary focus to me in my experience is that the exhibits are about the art. They're primarily, let's say, located in white, upper class, middle class neighborhoods. We tend to think of the patrons as being primarily not people of color. The exhibits as well as the costliness of admissions into these spaces are somewhat prohibitive for many people. Is enough being done to revise what a museum can be? I mean, it seems to me you've got a very inclusive approach to your work, but I'm not sure that we see that throughout the museum world.
Thelma Golden
I think that museums can be different, and the reason I know that is because in looking at the history of museums, we have had many periods of reinvention and reevaluation of museums that have created two models. The museum that I'm privileged to leave was part of that. In the late sixties when museums were being protested here in New York City because of their exclusion of black and Latino and women artists, and these protests were being led primarily by artists but also concerned citizens. These were the great museums in New York City.
That while there was an effort in those protests to shift and change those institutions, there also was an effort to create new institutional models. The Studio Museum in Harlem and El Museo del Barrio here in New York came out of that moment. Is enough being done? There's much more work to be done. I think the field acknowledges in this moment the necessity for that work, but it's not simply a case of revision. In some cases it's a case of reinvention. I think that we're also in a moment where we're going to see new models. We see so many arts institutions now, for example, being started by artists taking away this idea of who and how we understand the formation of institution, but creating spaces that clearly reflect directly the needs of audiences. We have to make the experience something that can be meaningful, welcoming for everyone.
Anita Hill
Right, and so does that mean having more diversity in terms of the directors of the museum, curators? How do you realize or reinvent or revise what we have now?
Thelma Golden
I think all of the above and then some, but what I'll say about that is I think that in every situation it might be a different combination of those factors. I think that the other part of this that's most important to me is that while institutions exist in this way, that they are broad. We also have to really acknowledge the specificity of who we are institutionally and lean into that as we try to reimagine and reinvent. If we have an institutional mandate to create access, we have to then also, take the steps to say, well, what does access look like and what is that experience in real terms when visitors come to the museum? We also have to think about how we make art and we make culture more truly accessible, so that it has the opportunity to exist for all people and we can move to a place where we can see an art in a museum world where the barriers that we know that still exist for many people don't continue to exist.
Anita Hill
You are now at the Studio Museum. You are developing a new space in terms of a new building, which is so exciting. Can you tell us how that came about?
Thelma Golden
Yes, it is so exciting and it came about really through the sort of vision, I would say, of all the directors of the Studio Museum that came before me. The reason I say that is because the ambition for this institution began at its founding. Even though at our founding we were in a rented second story space over a liquor store on Fifth Avenue between 125th Street and 126th Street, the vision for what would be a state-of-the-art purpose built building to celebrate and steward the work of black artists was always what I know they imagined. We embarked on this project, selected the architects or David Ajay to design the building. David known, of course, for his design of the National Museum of African American history and Culture, but significant also, for us at the Studio Museum because of his ongoing work with art and artists specifically. We closed the building, the old building in 2018, and began a process that began with its demolition to now we are in construction on this new space and hope to be open in a few years.
Anita Hill
I listen to you speak and you talk about the history, the present and the future. Do you ever hear from people who say, "Well, there's so many other problems that we're having in the black community, in Harlem, in the world that is the museum the place to put this money?"
Thelma Golden
What I often hear is a nuanced and subtle understanding that this museum, but perhaps a museum, a cultural institution is important within the civic life of a community like Harlem. We are very privileged in Harlem to work among some iconic cultural institutions. I think there is an incredible understanding in our community of the way in which cultural institutions have been anchors in the community, in this community for some almost a century, for many of us a half a century. The desire for that to continue as a way to continue to support the constant need for this community and a need that comes from the care and the commitment that cultural institutions have to the lives of those in our immediate neighborhood and throughout the city and essentially, throughout the world.
Anita Hill
It seems to me personally, that art has always been part of the lifeblood of a community of any community, but particularly this community. It brings vibrancy and that it brings joy into a community, which is essential for communities to grow and prosper.
Thelma Golden
Yes, it is. It's essential in that it brings joy. It brings a sense of being able to ground into a space of inspiration. It allows for the ability to engage with a sense of one's own humanity and all of that kind of lives as deeply important and is acknowledged as such because of the important place culture plays within the black community.
Anita Hill
I want to explore this idea of where art is today. I read the term post black art. For someone who doesn't really understand the term, how would you explain post black art?
Thelma Golden
Yes. Well, the term post black as it was engaged around an exhibition that I curated with the curator, Christine Kim in 2001, an exhibition called Freestyle, which was an exhibition that looked at the work of emerging black artists at that moment. What we were speaking about was the generational shift that we saw that it first was subtle and then became so much more apparent of a younger generation of black artists who were looking beyond the black arts movement as a way to understand themselves, their identity and culture in the work that they were making.
Anita Hill
Have we evolved to a new generation for young black artists? Are they in a different place now than they were when you coined the phrase?
Thelma Golden
Definitely, and that's what I think is so important and significant about thinking about art that often, we want to think in these long lineages, but quite often when we look at the world and how the world moves, that shifts become clear and apparent in much more discreet ways. That exhibition in 2001, which included artists like Julie Merhetu and Mark Bradford and Sanford Bakers and so many others, if we look now and we see we've had almost two groups of artists since that continue to reimagine, redefine the space of what it means to make work in this moment.
Anita Hill
I also see those artists as really moving society forward, not only moving art forward, but moving society forward in our understanding about what art is and what it does for us.
Thelma Golden
I agree, and I think that's why I continue to want to create space, protect space, make more space for the visions and voices of artists.
Anita Hill
I want to come back to Lowery Stokes Sims. She has said that guardians of black culture are not the gatekeepers. Many people may assume that people who hold certain positions in the art world are untouchable or unattainable. Do you see yourself as a guardian of black culture?
Thelma Golden
Not perhaps in the way that maybe others might imagine that the term would mean. I see myself as a guardian in the sense that I want to protect the space for black artists to work and to live and to be. I want to create the structures that support their creativity. I want to always be in a space of interpretive power around making space for their work and for them to be in the world. I see myself as someone who is working in collaboration with artists around making it possible for them to do what they do as it relates to how that can exist and to a public.
Anita Hill
I do see you as being the guardian, not the gatekeeper. I see your work as expanding space for the black radical imagination and art, as well as enlarging our own imagination, the public's imagination about where black artists and their art belongs. When I became a university professor at Brandeis, I was at a point when I was starting to understand the power of art, and I gave my university lecture to the university on a fairly arcane legal principle around equality and the way the Supreme Court would interpret whether something was equal. What I chose to do, rather than have a PowerPoint presentation with notes, was to use art from our collection, photos of art from our collection that reflected to me some of the points that I wanted to make in my lecture about the law. I think that was one of the best experiences that I've had in my teaching.
Thelma Golden
Fantastic. I absolutely love hearing that.
Anita Hill
What we do and what I do in the classroom is curate. To get prepared for a lecture, I am curating ideas.
Thelma Golden
Exactly.
Anita Hill
Understanding what a curator does has also helped me to understand my teaching. I just want to say thank you for being who you are and doing what you do, and for your continued attention to the issues of culture, narrative, change, positive change, and what in my own work amounts to the creation of a more equal society.
Thelma Golden
Thank you. Thank you for those words. I am so grateful to you and will continue to feel grateful for the space that you've created that's made it possible for so many of us to chart these incredible paths that will create a difference for the generations behind us.
Anita Hill
As a curator, Thelma Golden shapes her exhibits' narratives. As a museum director, she shapes the identity of museum space, expanding who it belongs to. Both are powerful roles, and she uses them to help us understand how location, representation, and creative fulfillment are linked to equity. Golden is a leader in a movement to change museum world thinking about artists and audiences access to art. I have no doubt that her optimistic vision of museums as inclusive spaces will be on full display in the new Studio Museum, and I look forward to its opening.
In the next episode, I speak with Houston-based artist and community organizer, Rick Lowe. We discuss his work with Project Row Houses, which is both an art project and a housing project.
Speaker 3
The way the houses is set up, it's 15 on one block and seven on the other block. I remember we were talking about what should we do with the other houses? The logical thinking was that, oh, we should have artists in residence that live here. That was a logical thing, but as I was speaking with a woman who was working with us as an administrator, she came up with this idea, "What if we try to do a housing program for teen mothers?"
Anita Hill
Getting even is a production of Pushkin Industries, and it's written and hosted by me, Anita Hill. It is produced by Mo LaBorde and Brittani Brown. Our editor is Sarah Kramer. Our engineer is Amanda Kay Wang, and our showrunner is Sachar Mathias. Luis Guerra composed original music for the show. Our executive producers are Mia Lobel and Leital Molad. Our director of development is Justine Lang. At Pushkin, thanks to Heather Fain, Carly Migliori, Jason Gambrell, Julia Barton, Jon Schnaars, and Jacob Weisberg.
You can find me on Twitter @AnitaHill and on Facebook @AnitaHill. You can find Pushkin on all social platforms @PushkinPods and you can sign up for our newsletter at Pushkin.fm. If you love this show in others from Pushkin Industries, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus. Subscribe to Pushkin Plus and you can hear Getting Even and other Pushkin shows ad free, and receive exclusive bonus episodes. Sign up on the Getting Even Show page in Apple Podcast or at Pushkin.fm. To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen.