Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/566702
useum directors just aren't celebrities. Even the best-known, Biennale-hopping, TED talk-giving, billionaire-courting directors have civilian lives that presumably allow them to visit the dry cleaner or deli unrecognized. Thelma Golden is comfortable being the exception to the rule. "Hey, Museum Lady!" people call to her on 125th Street in the upper Manhattan neighborhood where she lives and runs the Studio Museum in Harlem. "I'm in the Best Yet Market and people talk to me," she says, "or over at Serengeti getting my morning tea, or the ATM or the Red Rooster having dinner. I love it when they talk to me about what we're doing right; but I also love it when people suggest to me what they'd like to see us do and why. They come at me with broad existential questions about art, and very specific ones, like, 'You open today?''" Golden is many things. She's the driven exhibition organizer who, at 23, became the first black curator at the The Whitney, where she championed young black artists and orchestrated the game-changing 1994 show, "Black Male." She's been a guiding force in the careers of artists who've entered the canon under her watch, including Julie Mehretu, Kehinde Wiley and Glenn Ligon, among others. She's the on-message "cultural ambassador" the White House tapped to sit next to President Obama at a state dinner last year when French President Francois Hollande arrived dateless. She's the gamine darling of fashion editors, married to Nigerian-born, London-based lawyer-turned-designer Duro Olowu, whose supporters include the first lady and Anna Wintour. And for the last 15 years she's worked at the community-centric Studio Museum, dedicated to artists of African descent, where she began as an intern in her Smith College years. She's been its powerhouse director for the last decade. In an art world often seduced by spectacle, Golden privileges essences over appearances. Yet, her personal aesthetic is carefully, elegantly constructed. On an August Wednesday, the museum was closed and much of the heat-soaked city was on holiday. Golden, however, was in her office before 9 a.m., runway-ready in one of her husband's perfectly tailored creations—an ethnic-bohemian, quietly pattern-heavy dress cinched neatly with a fabric tie at her waist. Her shoes were pretty and practical—stacked heel, Mary Jane sandals designed for walking and working. Golden means business, and she knows how to make an impact. Her petite, 5-foot frame belies her outsize influence with artists, arts professionals and patrons, the last category being especially important to the museum now, given the July announcement of its $122 million expansion plan. "This structure was built in 1914 as an office building," Golden explained. "It's been beautifully adapted through a pioneering example of adaptive reuse by the brilliant architect J. Max Bond, but it wasn't built to be a museum." This has made installations time consuming and cumbersome. "We have to close fully every time we install, which is why we only change exhibitions three times a year. We have to shut down the entire museum, including all of our programs, which doesn't allow us to serve our community, and service is a central part of our mission." London-based architect David Adjaye, who was born in Tanzania, will design the new quarters, adding around 10,000 square feet of programmatic space with a mandate to create a welcoming home not just for exhibitions, but for conversations. "We want to be a public square for this neighborhood," says Golden, "and for Upper Manhattan." The museum's reach, like Golden's, extends well beyond its geographic confines though, and attendance figures have skyrocketed during her tenure. As a board member of the official New York marketing organization, NYC & Company, and an unabashed Harlem booster with family history there (her father, the son of Caribbean immigrants, grew up in Harlem), she's happy to report it's "one of the leading tourist destinations in New York." Golden's political activity, like the museum's audience, transcends local boundaries. A member of the Committee on White House Preservation since 2010, Golden was named to the board of directors for the Obama Foundation this July. The Studio Museum was born around the same time as Golden; both will turn 50 soon and both are in a moment of triumph. "Stanley Whitney: Dance the Orange," an exhibition of recent abstraction on view through October 25, shows the artist at the height of his power, and it's been universally lauded. Whitney, as an African-American artist born in the 1940s, was under some pressure to confront social issues directly in his art rather than cleave to abstraction. The Studio Museum and Golden have grappled with this critique, too. "As a museum devoted to artists of African descent, these dialogues come up about what the role of a black artist should be. This is a conversation black artists themselves have engaged in over time," says Golden. "Our approach is to take those issues up through the artworks and artists themselves, and to create a space where we value the authenticity and the validity of all kinds of approaches." Before she became director of the museum, Golden was chief curator, a title she retains. In that role, she initiated "Harlem Postcards," a project that's still thriving. "Each season we select four artists, and unlike almost all of our mission-based programs, this is open to artists of all cultures and ethnicities. We invite them to come to Harlem and take a picture that represents for them a vision of this community. We print each one on a postcard, and they're available in our lobby for free. We love seeing them on social media, or getting them back in the mail with personal messages." From her earliest days as a curator, Golden has thought about how art and community come together. "This is an institution of this neighborhood. We are in Harlem, but we are of this community," she says. The other thing people say to her on the street is, "Hey, I was just at your museum!" to which Golden earnestly replies, "'No, it's your museum. I'm just taking care of it.'" M 160 CULTURED