Thelma Golden: How Art Gives Shape to Cultural Change

Thelma Golden has become a driving force in the art world. Since disrupting the status quo with her 1994 exhibition, Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art, Golden has continued to create challenging dialogues around art and artists, making her one of the most respected curators in America. After ten years at the Whitney Museum of American Art, one of the nation's premier art institutions, Golden took up a new challenge in 2000, joining the Studio Museum in Harlem and becoming executive director and chief curator in 2005.

Just because you missed that awesome conference, doesn’t mean that you can’t still watch the lectures! This weekend, we feature Thelma Golden, curator at the Studio Museum in Harlem, talk at TED about three recent exhibitions that explore how art examines and redefines culture.



More about Thelma Golden

Fascinated by Museums as a Child

Thelma Golden knew she wanted to be a museum curator since late childhood and early adolescence. Born in 1965, she grew up in Queens, New York. As a child Golden first developed a love for art by studying reproductions of works from the Art Institute of Chicago's permanent collection. Golden found the prints on the playing cards for the board game, Masterpiece—despite her lack of interest in the game itself. She also became fascinated in museums themselves. "I think I, in going to museums as a young child, really realized that someone did that—I didn't have a name for it, but it was clear that somebody put those things up, somewhere," she recalled for Diane Haithman of the Los Angeles Times. "As soon as it became clear to me what that job was, that was the job I wanted." Indeed, Golden discovered the role of a curator when she was 12. She read about the pioneering African-American woman curator, Lowery Sims, of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Golden found her inspiration.
Golden's career began early and developed quickly. By her senior year in high school, Golden had begun training as a curatorial apprentice at the Metropolitan Museum. Soon she would attend Smith College in North Hampton, Massachusetts, where in 1987 she graduated with a degree in art history. One year as a curatorial intern at the Studio Museum in Harlem followed, and another as an assistant at the Whitney. Until 1991, Golden gained experience as visual arts director at the Jamaica Arts Center in New York, where she curated eight shows. After taking a position at the Whitney in 1991, Golden began to rise to national prominence in the art world.

Earned National Reputation

As the Whitney's branch director at Philip Morris from 1991 to 1993, Golden opened up the museum to previously under-represented artists—women, people of color—and gained a national reputation. At the Philip Morris branch Golden exhibited a number of artists, including Glenn Ligon, Suzanne McClelland, Gary Simmons, Y. David Chung, Alison Saar, and Judith Shea. Also, Golden explored more physical aspects of organizing an exhibition, as when she organized a showing of drape paintings, Golden Element Inside Gold, by Sam Gilliam in the Sculpture Court. Gilliam's works were among those representing the United States at the Venice Biennale in 1972 and have been part of the permanent collection of The Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of Modern Art in New York City, and the National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, in Washington, DC.
Meanwhile, Golden stepped out of New York City to spread her artistic message. In 1993 at the Columbus Museum of Art in Columbus, Ohio, for example, she delivered a lecture and slide presentation entitled "African-American Art: Myth and Reality" in which she examined social protest and black life and culture in twentieth-century art by African Americans. The ColumbusCall and Post advertised that her address would bring "new insights" to viewers of a concurrent exhibition of the works of a Columbus African American artist, Roman Johnson.
Golden affected her main impact in the U.S. art world during the 1990s through the Whitney, however. After a promotion in 1992 to associate curator, in 1993 Golden contributed to the design of a major event in the U.S. art world, the Whitney Biennial, a tradition which dates back to the Whitney's founding by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney when the philanthropist hoped to introduce the work of emerging U.S. artists into an art world dominated by European modernists. On a team led by the curator Elisabeth Sussman, Golden was one of four curators of the 1993 exhibition.
The 1993 Whitney Biennial combined video, performance art, photography, documentary material, text, objects, artifacts, and painting to challenge the viewer on controversial social issues. An investigation of race, gender, sexuality, AIDS, and gay rights, the show included direct social and political statements. "If, as it would seem, the purpose of this Biennial was to take the pulse of America, its vision is of a nation mired in racial, ethnic and sexual conflict, still reeling from the L.A. riots and the Clarence Thomas hearings and deeply ambivalent about 'difference' at the same time that the fact of social diversity becomes ever more inescapable," commented Eleanor Heartney, art critic, in Art in America. Reversing past practice at the Whitney, the vast majority of the 87 artists participating in the 1993 Biennial were women, African Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos, and gays.
The Biennial's aggressive social and artistic tack elicited substantial debate. Newsweek's art critic, Peter Plagens, derided the 1993 Biennial as "more a dyspeptically sad show than a radically feisty one. It's a melange of social complaints that sometimes takes on the tone of the New York Post edited by the Guerrilla Girls," a group of feminist art activists who protested the 1987 Biennial for racial and sexual exclusion. Quoted in Ms., the Guerrilla Girls praised the 1993 Biennial: "It's a show everyone likes to hate because it's a comment on our times…. [It] seems like this show is polarizing the aesthetes from people who see art as an expression of a certain time and a certain place." As one of four curators designing the prestigious Biennial, Golden played a central role in placing the Whitney at the center of this debate in 1993.

Sparked Controversy

Consistent with the bold approach at the Whitney Museum of American Art in the 1990s, Golden sparked national controversy in 1994 and 1995 with an exhibition she curated herself, entitled Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art. Works by 29 artists chosen by Golden to illustrate current conceptions of black masculinity spread across the second and third floors of the Whitney. The artists were black men, such as Gary Simmons, Glenn Ligon, and Lyle Ashton Harris; black women, such as Adrian Piper, Lorna Simpson, Carrie Mae Weems, and Renee Cox; and a few Asian, Hispanic, and white artists to provide a multitude of perspectives. The exhibition also incorporated film, video, and media and was accompanied by an extensive catalogue.

Read more: Thelma Golden Biography - Fascinated by Museums as a Child, Earned National Reputation, Sparked Controversy http://biography.jrank.org/pages/2915/Golden-Thelma.html#ixzz04h6qQnzw