The art world is a different place today. Top commercial galleries compete to represent emerging artists of color; auction prices for Kerry James Marshall, Mark Bradford, Simone Leigh, Henry Taylor, and other Black art stars are in the millions; and “Black Male” is a subject of graduate dissertations. Michael Govan, the director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, recently called it “one of the most important exhibitions in American history.”
Thelma Golden grew up in the heart of the Black middle class. Both her parents were born in New York, her father in Harlem and her mother in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. Arthur Golden, who supported his widowed mother and his grandmother, started his own insurance business when he was a student at New York University, and he later attended law school. He married Thelma Eastmond in 1963, and the couple bought a house in St. Albans, an area in Queens that was rapidly changing from white to Black. Their first child, Thelma, was born in 1965, and her brother, Arthur, came a year later. Theirs was an extended family of grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins, most of whom “treated you as if they were your parent,” Golden said. “It was an environment where I felt a deep sense of security.” Her mother, whose social and civic life included volunteer work for the N.A.A.C.P. and other Black organizations, saw to it that her children had a full schedule of after-school activities (for Thelma, piano lessons, ice-skating, gymnastics).
Thelma started working for her father when she was ten, at his office in Queens. At first it was play work, sharpening pencils and opening letters, but as she got older he let her do more and more, filing and xeroxing and answering the telephone. “I would put on my Mary Tyler Moore voice and ask the right questions,” she said. “I just loved being in that office and learning.”
Her parents valued culture, and took their children to concerts at Carnegie Hall, Broadway shows, and museum exhibitions. Golden started going to museums on her own when she was fifteen, taking the E or F train, both of which stopped very close to the Museum of Modern Art. She already knew that she wanted to be involved with art somehow, even though she had no interest in or talent for making it. She became friends with the guards at MoMA, a number of whom were Black. “That’s how I first saw Jacob Lawrence’s ‘Migration Series,’ ” she said to me. “A guard told me about it.” Today, she has long-standing relationships with guards throughout the city. “I hate going to museums with Thelma,” Ligon, one of her closest friends, said to me, jokingly. “It’s twenty minutes to see the show and an hour to talk with the guards.”
Thelma and Arthur went to private schools, first Buckley Country Day School, in Roslyn, Long Island, and then, in Thelma’s case, the New Lincoln School, a progressive school on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. (Arthur went to Fordham Preparatory School, in the Bronx.) New Lincoln offered a highly personalized education, and it was open to different ways of learning. It was also more integrated than other New York private schools at that time. The principal was an African American woman named Verne Oliver. At their first meeting, Oliver gave Golden a paperback copy of Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man,” and told her to read a section of it every week, and then come to her office and discuss it. “I think maybe Verne saw that I was going to live a life of the mind, and that it would be rooted in the African American community,” Golden said. “She gave me a sense of my own ability to understand the world that I would not just enter but help to create.”
Golden met Alexandra Llewellyn in the fall of their first year at New Lincoln. Golden was fifteen, and although Llewellyn was a year younger, and in the class behind her, they quickly became best friends. “We were completely different,” Llewellyn, who married the best-selling novelist Tom Clancy and now lives in Los Angeles, told me in a recent telephone conversation. Eight inches taller and more outgoing than Golden, Llewellyn admired her friend’s self-possession—she herself had no idea what she would do in life. They had similar West Indian backgrounds—Jamaica and Barbados for Golden, Jamaica for Llewellyn, whose father was an extremely successful businessman. “I thought Thelma had the most wonderful parents,” she said. “It was a happy household. You could feel how much they loved Thelma, and when I was there I was included in that. We did everything together—after school and on weekends we’d go to her place or mine, which was on the West Side, or to a museum, or to Bloomingdale’s to look at clothes. After the Black designer Willi Smith came out with his line, we bought matching raincoats. We’ve been friends for forty years.”
The Metropolitan Museum of Art has a high-school internship program, and Thelma interned there two years in a row. Every day, she hoped to meet Lowery Stokes Sims, the Met’s only Black curator, whom Thelma knew about because her father had shown her an article on Sims. (He often clipped stories about notable Black people for his children to read.) They didn’t meet then—Golden was too shy to seek her out—but a few years later Sims became one of her mentors. Sims met Golden’s parents, and her warm, inclusive authority helped convince Arthur Golden that museum work could be a viable career for his daughter.
Golden had decided that she wanted to work in a museum, and not just any museum; in her college applications, she specified that her goal was to be a curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Why the Whitney? Because the art that most intrigued Golden was contemporary and American. She applied to seven colleges, and her first choice, Barnard, was the only one that turned her down. In 1983, she entered Smith College.
Kellie Jones, a curator and art historian who would later hire Golden, described her to me in a way that sounded like the quintessential Smith woman: “Always put-together, always has the right answer, smart beyond smart, can fit into any situation, one of those people who knows what she wants to do and pursues it at the top level.” In the winter of 1985, Golden interned at the Studio Museum, an experience that, she told me, “sealed and cemented” her future curatorial path. “I was so excited,” she recalled. “That was when the museum was not just opening doors for Studio Museum artists but for artists generally. It was a place that needed and welcomed everyone’s involvement. I knew I would major in art history, but when I went back to Smith that fall I decided to double-major in African American studies.”
Golden understood that the art history she had learned so far was incomplete, because art by Black people was mostly absent from her assigned reading. When she told one of her art-history professors at Smith that she wanted to write about Black art, he pulled out a catalogue of Frank Stella’s black paintings. (She clarified that she meant Black artists, and he discouraged the idea.) In the academic world, few people taught Golden anything about Black art, but she had grown up with it. Several of her parents’ friends were serious collectors, and she had read about Faith Ringgold, Charles White, and other artists in the Black press. In the Smith library, she found the catalogue for “Two Centuries of Black American Art,” David Driskell’s pioneering 1976 exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The library also had a 1973 book called “The Afro-American Artist: A Search for Identity,” by Elsa Honig Fine. “I studied every artist in those books,” Golden told me. “I sort of committed them to memory.”
Some of the earliest artists in the Driskell catalogue—Patrick Reason, Robert S. Duncanson, and other nineteenth-century portraitists and landscape painters—were clearly influenced by Thomas Cole and other white artists of the Romantic period. Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859-1937), the first African American painter to be widely known, studied with Thomas Eakins and painted scenes that depicted Black people, but in 1891 he went to Paris, where he stayed for the rest of his life, becoming, in effect, a European artist. In later generations, Aaron Douglas, Augusta Savage, Charles Alston, Selma Burke, and Norman Lewis forged art careers in America, despite the odds against them. (Burke’s portrait of Franklin Delano Roosevelt is believed to be the model for his profile on the dime.) All of these artists were part of the Harlem Renaissance, in the nineteen-twenties and thirties, an explosion of innovation in the arts which established Harlem as the creative center of Black culture. Black musicians of the era—Louis Armstrong, Eubie Blake, Duke Ellington—certainly reached white audiences, but it would be seventy more years before the white art establishment took serious notice of what Black artists were doing.
By the nineteen-sixties and seventies, however, more and more of them were emerging, some working abstractly and conceptually, others dedicated to making figurative, narrative art about Black people and their lives in a society that was becoming increasingly mixed. They showed their work at historically Black colleges and universities, and, eventually, in a few galleries that featured Black artists, such as Linda Goode Bryant’s Just Above Midtown, on West Fifty-seventh Street in Manhattan, and the Brockman Gallery, in Los Angeles. Now and then, in the seventies and eighties, one of the big museums would show an African American artist. “Everybody puts their big Black shows on the books, they get their corporate funding, it goes all around the country, it’s a big extravaganza, and then it’s over,” Golden once said, in a roundtable discussion. Recognition came slowly, and often faded. It was not until the turn of the century that Black artists started to receive steady, continuing support from the white art establishment, and it took a dozen years more before their work began to sell at prices comparable to those of their white contemporaries. Most of the artists in Golden’s shows at the Whitney have become prominent in a transformed art world where, now that the blinders are off, there is no doubt about the importance and centrality of their work in America’s cultural history.
“At Smith, they were teaching me to be an art historian, but I wanted to work in museums, to learn how to be a curator,” Golden told me. After graduating, in 1987, she took a one-year fellowship at the Studio Museum. After that, she became a curatorial assistant to the Whitney curator Richard Armstrong, a droll and original thinker who would become the director of the Guggenheim Museum in 2008. “The key thing about Thelma is that she never complained, and she became indispensable,” Armstrong told me. She didn’t stay long. Kellie Jones, the daughter of the poets Hettie Jones and Amiri Baraka, recruited Golden to help her run the Jamaica Center for the Performing and Visual Arts, a community space in Queens. “Kellie introduced me to many artists, and she let me learn how to manage,” Golden told me. “It was really my master’s in arts administration.”
In 1991, Golden went back to the Whitney, where David Ross put her in charge of the Philip Morris branch, and later made her an associate curator in the main museum. It was her schoolgirl wish come true. Then as now, Golden was inexhaustible, out most nights, constantly working, as hungry for social connection as she was for art. Ross said, “Thelma was the kind of person who would stay out until two or three in the morning with the artists, being part of the New York art scene, and then she’d show up at ten in the morning, fresh as a daisy. Thelma was an unlimited energy source, and she was just plugged into everything that was going on.”
Ross and Golden both left the Whitney in 1998. Thelmaphiles like to imagine what might have happened if they had stayed and continued to carry out the radical changes they had set in motion. Golden curated many memorable shows at the Whitney, from “Black Male” to a retrospective of Bob Thompson, a Black artist whose radiant, unexpected color combinations in paintings of men and women, birds and other animals, and unreal landscapes were influenced by the Old Masters. His brilliant career had ended early, like Basquiat’s, because of a heroin overdose, when Thompson was twenty-eight.
Golden left the Whitney, abruptly, while the Thompson show was still on the walls. Ross had resigned to take the director’s job at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Maxwell L. Anderson, his successor, from the Art Gallery of Ontario, began to revamp the Whitney’s curatorial structure. Golden, whom Ross had made head curator of the 2000 Biennial, found that she was no longer in charge of it. (Anderson claims that he merely asked her to share the position.) Golden felt that she was being given a role with less freedom and authority than the one she’d had before, and, as she told me, “I chose not to take it.” She was not alone. Within four months of Anderson’s arrival, at least four other people on the staff had resigned. The list included Lisa Phillips, who left to become the director of the New Museum, and Adam Weinberg, who went to head the Addison Gallery of American Art. (In 2003, Weinberg replaced Anderson as the Whitney’s director.)