Journalist Calvin Tomkins observed that the art world has a Before and an After, and the pivot is Thelma Golden. He wrote that when Golden “was a young curator in the '90s, her shows centering Black artists were unprecedented. Today, those artists are the stars of the art market.” Even before she became Director and Curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem, Golden transformed the possibilities for Black artists, and brought the rest of us into her world. In this session, Thelma and her friend and colleague, Glenn Lowry, the longtime Director of the Museum of Modern Art, will discuss how they have worked together– and separately– to bring more people of color into the museum world and how that has changed what we see and how we see it.


Further thinking
ARTICLE: The Art World Before and After Thelma Golden, by Calvin Tomkins
BOOK: Black Refractions: Highlights from The Studio Museum in Harlem, by Connie H. Choi and Thelma Golden and Kellie Jones, Foreword by Pauline Willis
BOOK: Among Others: Blackness at MoMA, by by Darby English (Author, Editor), Charlotte Barat (Author, Editor), Mabel Wilson (Contributor)
BOOK: MoMA Now, introduction by Glenn D. Lowry. Essay by Quentin Bajac, Christophe Cherix, Stuart Comer, Rajendra Roy, Martino Stierli, and Ann Temkin