I had to wait for the next generation—my older sister—to overcome this uncertainty and introduce me to the political, social, and aesthetic significance of Harlem. In the company of my sister, I protested the construction of the State Office Building at 125th and Seventh Avenues in 1969 and went to the Studio Museum in Harlem, which opened on Fifth Avenue in 1968, where I found ways to understand what my father probably never understood, even though he embodied it: the complexities associated with the wandering, dreamy, diasporic self.
Last summer I was fortunate enough to be given a tour of the Studio Museum in its new home in Harlem by its director and chief curator, Thelma Goldenwho, together with an architectural firm Adjaye Associates has been working for a long time to recreate and expand the museum. (The museum was given a building on West 125th Street in 1979; that incarnation closed in 2018 and was demolished to make way for the current building.) My impression of the new building was more spiritual than architectural: I was struck by how its design provided a perfect synthesis between the tangible and intangible—an unusual quality for a museum, given that one of its goals is to acquire materials, creating a unique collection that speaks as much about the interests of the institution as it does about his interests. they do exhibitions. On the other hand, the Studio Museum in Harlem did not adopt a formal collecting policy until 1977 under the leadership of its fourth director, scholar Mary Schmidt Campbell. (The museum has had seven directors since its founding, with Golden being the longest-serving; this year marks her twentieth year at the helm.)
When I was a child, the sister who took me to the museum also took me to see black nationalist-inspired plays in places like the East in Brooklyn, but I don't remember encountering any forced ideological work at the Studio Museum in Harlem. (Don't confuse ideology with politics—the Studio Museum has a history of political engagement that is integral to its DNA.) The museum's primary mission then was to showcase living black artists and connect them to the community, and to provide a space where they could work—hence the “studio” in the name. That spirit hasn't changed, but the scale of the museum—from the extraordinary lobby with its wide, welcoming entrance and adjoining seating area inspired by the stoops of Harlem where so much life happens, to the verticality of the space that rises up, up, up, carrying your mood with it—speaks of something different now, less about ambition than about the realization of dreams. The museum is a manifestation of possibility, especially opportunity in the lives of black people who do not experience hope by name.
In recent decades, Harlem, through no fault of its own, has become a symbol of political and economic defeat—how blacks live Not matter. Sometimes I think the general perception of this place was frozen in 1964, when the people of Harlem rioted for six days after a fifteen-year-old child was shot and killed by an off-duty police officer. The Harlem I knew growing up was violent and nostalgic – the Cotton Club Langston And Zora And Billy“Get whitey” and all that – but nowadays, in the developing community, he was never himself. The new Studio Museum roots Harlem in the present without insisting on it, and in doing so tells a different story: Harlem has a future, and the future is now.
During the tour, Golden showed me where creators who win a spot in the museum's Artist-in-Residence program will have studio space. (Previous recipients range from Kerry James Marshall and Leonardo Drew to Leslie Hewitt and Julie Mehretu. Malcolm Peacock, Zoe Pulley and Sonia Louise Davis make up the final class.) When Golden described some of the programs planned for the museum's educational workshop on creative arts for people of all ages, I was struck by her ability—and her desire—to present the art and ideas that can be developed here in her historical community. It is an important part of the Studio Museum's legacy, as is Golden's. On Whitney Museum of American ArtBefore coming to the Studio Museum, she curated, among other exhibitions, the first retrospective of the black artist Bob Thompson, a brilliant artist who died of a heroin overdose in 1966 at the age of twenty-eight, and the landmark exhibition “The Black Man: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art,” which featured the black man, his body, and his mind as seen, heard, or experienced by a variety of artists: from David Hammons And Jean-Michel Basquiat Leon Golub and Adrian Piper – at the center of an influential New York institution, where they rarely appeared at all. She brought this level of assertiveness and her desire to connect exhibitions to what she observed in the world to the Studio Museum.
For the opening of the new building, Golden assembled a sort of introductory mural wall of sorts near the lobby. The section is called “From Now: The Collection in Context” and includes works I knew as a child, such as Tom Feelings' wonderful black and white print “Untitled (Mother and Child)” from 1967. In the mosaic of figures and narratives that Golden was assembling with a loving eye, I was struck by the presence of several images of challenging strangeness: a color photograph by Max Petrus from 1976, James Baldwin holding the hand of his artist mentor Beauford Delaneyfor example, and Texas Isaiah's 2021 image “Ceremonies (Lullaby for My Insomnia),” which features a handsome brown trans person with pierced ears and a string of pearls. It's no secret—and shouldn't be—that black nationalism, which was also part of the fabric of Harlem, was rarely, and rarely created, a gay home. But here it is: Golden said in a deft manner, without bombast: “Queerness is part of who we are, our current revolution of being, so let's look at it—together.”
