The New Studio Museum in Harlem Shows that Black Art Matters

I had to wait for the next generation—my older sister—to break through that uncertainty and introduce me to the political, social, and aesthetic significance of Harlem. In my sister’s company, I protested the construction of the State Office Building, at 125th and Seventh Avenue, in 1969, and I went to the Studio Museum in Harlem, which opened, on Fifth Avenue, in 1968, where I found ways of understanding what my father probably never understood, although he embodied it: the complications of being a wandering, dreaming, diasporic self.

Last summer, I was fortunate enough to be given a tour of the Studio Museum in Harlem’s new home by its director and chief curator, Thelma Golden, who, with the architecture firm Adjaye Associates, had been working to re-create and expand the museum for a long time. (The museum had been given a building, on West 125th Street, in 1979; that incarnation closed in 2018 and was demolished to make way for the current structure.) My impression of the new building was more spiritual than architectural: I was struck by how its design allows a perfect synthesis between the material and the immaterial—an unusual quality for a museum, given that part of its purpose is to acquire material, to build a unique collection that says as much about the institution’s interests as its exhibitions do. Then again, the Studio Museum in Harlem did not establish an official collecting policy until 1977, under the leadership of its fourth director, the scholar Mary Schmidt Campbell. (The museum has had seven directors since it was founded, with Golden serving the longest in the post; this year is her twentieth at the helm.)

When I was a kid, the sister who took me to the museum also took me to see Black-nationalist-inspired plays at places like the East, in Brooklyn, but I don’t remember coming across 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 show living Black artists and connect them to the community, while also providing a space where they could work—hence the “studio” in the name. That ethos hasn’t changed, but the scale of the museum—from the extraordinary lobby, with its wide, welcoming entranceway and an adjacent seating area inspired by Harlem’s stoops, where so much life happens, to the verticality of the space as it goes up, up, up, taking your spirits with it—says something different now, not so much about ambition as about the realization of dreams. The museum is a manifestation of possibility, specifically possibility in Black lives that are not on a first-name basis with hope.

In recent decades, Harlem, through no fault of its own, has come to symbolize political and economic defeat—how Black lives don’t matter. Sometimes I feel that the general perception of the place is frozen in 1964, when Harlemites rioted for six days after a fifteen-year-old kid was shot by an off-duty police officer. The Harlem I knew when I was growing up evoked violence and nostalgia—the Cotton Club, Langston and Zora and Billie, “Get whitey” and all that—but was never realistically itself in the present time, an evolving community. The new Studio Museum roots Harlem in the present, without insisting on it, and in that way it tells a different tale: Harlem has a future, and the future is now.

During the tour, Golden showed me where the makers who had won a spot in the museum’s Artist-in-Residence program would have studio space. (Past recipients range from Kerry James Marshall and Leonardo Drew to Leslie Hewitt and Julie Mehretu. Malcolm Peacock, Zoë Pulley, and sonia louise davis make up the most recent class.) As Golden described some of the programs that were planned for the museum’s Education Workshop, which is dedicated to art-making activities for all ages, I was taken by her ability—and her willingness—to imagine the art and ideas that could be fostered here in her historic community. That’s an important part of the Studio Museum’s legacy, and Golden’s, too. At the Whitney Museum of American Art, before coming to the Studio Museum, she curated, among other shows, the first retrospective of the Black artist Bob Thompson, a brilliant painter who died of a heroin overdose in 1966, at the age of twenty-eight, and the landmark exhibition “Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art,” which put the Black man, his body and his mind—as seen, heard, or experienced by artists ranging from David Hammons and Jean-Michel Basquiat to Leon Golub and Adrian Piper—front and center at a powerful New York institution where they rarely appeared at all. She brought that degree of assertiveness—and her desire to tie exhibitions to what she observes in the world—to the Studio Museum as well.

For the opening of the new building, Golden put together a sort of introductory wall of images, just off the lobby. The section is titled “From Now: A Collection in Context” and includes works I knew as a child, such as Tom Feelings’s wonderful black-and-white print “Untitled (Mother and Child),” from 1967. In the mosaic of figures and narratives which Golden assembled with a loving eye, I was jolted by the presence of several depictions of defiant queerness: Max Petrus’s 1976 color photograph of James Baldwin holding the hand of his mentor the artist Beauford Delaney, for one, and Texas Isaiah’s 2021 image “Ceremonies (Lullaby for My Insomniac),” which shows a beautiful brown trans person with pierced ears, sporting a string of pearls. It’s no secret—nor should it be—that Black nationalism, which has also been part of the fabric of Harlem, has rarely been, or made, a home for queerness. But here it was: Golden was saying, in an artful way, free of bombast, Queerness is part of who we are, our current revolution of being, so let’s look at it—together.