Thelma Golden

EO

Thelma and I were at dinner a few weeks ago, talking about magazines and contemporary culture—something she said has stuck with me. She remarked that in the 1990s, as the internet was beginning to take hold, people feared it would kill newspapers. But what it really killed, she said, were magazines and zine culture. When I think of your name, it’s synonymous with space-making and institution-building. How has the institution grappled with the rise of the internet—and how have you personally navigated the evolving technologies since you first encountered them?

TG

First of all, hello—I’m so glad you’re all here and want to share space this evening. And thank you for inviting me to do this. I think the institution and I are two different things. I came of age as a curator and thinker right on the cusp of the internet, but it wasn’t part of how I understood my practice. It’s all been additive. I worked in a world before the internet, so in many ways, my experience has been different from that of the institution. For museums—much like newspapers back then—there was a fear that the internet would make people stop coming altogether. But what we’ve seen is the opposite: it’s actually opened the door for more people to access and engage with art, to imagine a personal relationship to it.

My interest in museums has always been about art, of course, but also about institutions—specifically museums as civic institutions. I’ve always been focused on questions of accessibility: who gets to go to museums? Who feels like they belong? As someone who grew up in New York City and felt that museums were safe, open, welcoming spaces, that spirit has always guided my thinking. The internet has only expanded that ethos. So while the institution and I have had different timelines and entry points with technology, my values and the evolution of digital culture have aligned in a way that’s deepened what’s possible—making the museum even more accessible, more porous, more alive.

EO

What does it mean when there’s the internet—and then there’s art? How has that relationship changed the conversation around collecting? Around the types of art we engage with—and at the Studio Museum specifically?

TG

Specifically for the Studio Museum, what was always our aspiration and ambition—to be a global institution—the internet made that real. And that’s been incredibly important. Our mission has always been to preserve, present, collect, and interpret the work of artists of African descent—locally, nationally, and internationally. What the internet did was put real weight behind that mission. It allowed us to be in dialogue with artists and audiences across the world, not just in theory but in practice. It added a kind of equity to that commitment—because access wasn’t limited by geography or gatekeeping. Suddenly, the global aspect wasn’t aspirational. It was operational.

EO

I remember when you curated Black Male at the Whitney in 1994. That show really took to task the idea of the Black male’s presence in society—it was interpreted through the work of both men and women, across different racial and cultural backgrounds. And it was heavily contested at the time. You even went on Charlie Rose to talk about it.

One thing that’s always stuck with me is something you said in an interview—I forget where—but you mentioned that after the show, you took a big trip. Maybe to Mexico? Or Los Angeles? Where did you go?

TG

You mean when the show opened? Miami.

EO

You went to Miami, because that's when all the press came out.

TG

[Laughs.] Well, I was trying to explain the world before the internet to you—which is that there were these things called newspapers, and they came out each day. And you could only buy them on the day they came out. Sometimes you could only get them in the city where they were published—maybe the next day in another city. So one could escape, right? Certain aspects of it, at least. [Laughs.]

So the exhibition was opening on a Wednesday, the review was going to be in The New York Times on Friday, and I went to Miami on Thursday. Which meant that until I came back from Miami—

EO

The exhibit didn't exist in your mind?

TG

Well, the review. The exhibit was fine, but the review didn’t exist. And it was just a very different world. Many of the reviews were in magazines that had three month leads, so it meant that some of them didn't come out until after the exhibition was closed. I was just saying it was just a different mode of reception. I'm not nostalgic for that in any way, but it did change my own relationship to my work.

EO

Exactly. It re-shaped how you work. I mean, I feel like I’ve grown up with the internet…

TG

How is that possible?

EO

The internet used to be one-destination oriented—you’d log on, and spend hours on a single site. It didn’t reroute you anywhere else. Now, especially in the last ten years, you might go from Facebook to Twitter, back to Facebook, then into Instagram. That’s not the internet I knew growing up. I’d sit in one place, communicating from my computer. At most I used it for the dictionary.

The reason I bring up technology is because your work is so conceptually rigorous—the shows you curated, the ideas behind them. It feels prophetic. Yes, it’s rooted in simple principles—desire, representation, sex, orientation—but what were you responding to in that moment, without that technology?

TG

Without the internet, how do we make exhibitions? No, you know what? It was the space of ideas, of that moment happening in real time, that drove the work. I was really fortunate to be in New York, coming out of college in the late ’80s, beginning my [internship] at the Studio Museum in 1987. I was a fellow before going into the Whitney in 1988, and all of the ways in which we engaged intellectually were in real space. It happened in the space of conferences. Literally, every other week there was a conference. [Laughter.] The cultural world and the academic world melded in those spaces. There was a whole mode of presentation we were trained in, where you gave papers at conferences—the equivalent of what it is now to publish online. Those papers would then sometimes be published in books, whether by a major publisher or simply put together and distributed more informally.

To go to a conference meant you traveled somewhere to do that—there was no other access to it—so those spaces created different relationships across geographies. That’s where so much of it came from. As a curator, essentially from the beginning of my career, my work was deeply informed by artists. That was the magic of that moment: I emerged alongside a generation of artists who were navigating their own practice and the art and culture world in ways that were unprecedented. We all moved in those spaces together. A lot of it was about what could exist in the spaces that were there, but it was also about making spaces and creating.

I thought about this so much as we’ve all been grappling with the grief of these past years. In the ideas world I grew up in professionally, no one was more at the center of it than Greg Tate. When you think about the ideas in Black Male, not one of them was something I didn’t speak to Greg about—often he would send me down a path. His essay for that catalog, in his mind, he wasn’t going to write—he said, “I don’t need to write an essay for the catalog.” But he had charted out a whole genealogy that infused the exhibition, mapped out in real time over telephone landlines, with call waiting clicking in the background.

EO

I want to push back on your point, because you have this reverence for pop culture—I was reading about you being at Smith College and reading the Village Voice, and that it always arrived—

TG

A week late.

EO

But it seems like you have such a specific relationship to pop culture—it’s so specific. What were you reaching for at that point? I also learned that you and Hilton Als met at a conference, and he walked in with an orange tote bag on his shoulder. And you held on to that friendship.

More importantly, to give context, my intervention with you happened in 2014. When I first moved to New York, I saw you, Huey Copeland and Hilton Als all speak at the New School, which is where I went to undergrad, and it was the 20th anniversary of Black Male exhibition. Witnessing their conversation changed my thinking about and around representation. It expanded my sense of the stakes and further emphasized executing—the doing of the thing, and the being of the thing, beyond the mere “seeming.”

But what’s your relationship to pop culture? Not that I feel like you’re evading, but there’s a lot that happens offline, in those rooms. The whole point of this project is to expose those conversations. You’re saying it’s artist-driven, but what does that mean? Because you guys existed in a very different world of art, the art world used to be so small. This is what people don't realize—we see art now around us in books and type, art and fashion have met each other—art is fashion, culture, and pop culture. People do know who Basquiat is, but not because of the rigor in the work or its formal qualities.

TG

So, pop culture. Well, first of all, when I became a curator in the late ‘80s, it felt to me that many of the people around me who were doing interesting things were doing them in the realm of pop culture. We're talking in the ‘90s—the music industry of that moment, what was going on in publishing, what was happening in film and independent film. I always sort of understood the world of pop culture as one that I had to have deep and profound adjacency to in order to create work that felt like it belonged and understood itself in a moment.

But it also was because I decided I wanted to be a curator when I was fifteen—when I wrote my college essay, I said, “I want to be a curator at the Whitney Museum.” Okay, I was that kid, right? In so many ways, pop culture was also a way for me to find a way outside of the strictures of art history and the museum world. Curating is a practice now. It’s all of that—none of this was that interesting back then. I had the most boring job of all of my friends. Let’s talk about my friends who were working in the early days of hip-hop, like for real. [Laughs.]

EO

[Laughs.] But you were at the parties, right?

TG

Exactly. Completely at the parties. The Voice of that moment—the Village Voice—Hilton, Lisa Jones, Nelson George, Donald Suggs, Scott Poulson-Bryant, Joe Morgan, Dream Hampton, all of them were working at the Voice. There were other worlds that felt so much more attached to the present. That's why I was interested in pop culture. But I also was interested simply because it was the world that I came from.

Certainly, when I said I wanted to be a curator as a fifteen-year old, it wasn’t until Jasmine Guy who played Whitley on A Different World became a curator that the reception of the job changed. Never in the world was there any recognition, when people said curator. And then it was like, “oh, Whitley, right.” I mean, around Black folks, definitely. So, pop culture was also a space in which there was a kind of recognition for the importance and space of culture.

EO

Now we know the Whitney Museum to be just “the Whitney.” But I was watching the Charlie Rose interview with Elizabeth Sussman, and she was like, “the Whitney Museum is the only American museum in America that focuses on American art.” I think that type of cultural distinction and specificity allows for a kind of convergence that relies on the context of America and pop culture. Where else could that have occurred?

TG

I feel very grateful for the time I had at the Whitney because it really did allow me as a curator to think broadly and to create lots of space for not just art and artists, but ideas. It formed me in very profound ways. What made me say at fifteen that I wanted to work at the Whitney—I think I felt that resonance even as someone who went to the Whitney as a young person, and began to understand the true power of curatorial vision through those exhibitions.

Now, during those same years in high school, I was an intern at the Met. I went to the Met every day after school and worked in the American Decorative Arts department—the very important job of…

EO

[Laughs.] Getting and filing paperwork?

TG

Exactly. And this is pre-fax machine. So, the whole job was taking things from one department to another. But it was fascinating to me to understand a museum not just as its public face, but as this repository of objects that span time and place and that were touched by many people—made, created, envisioned. As a fifteen-year-old, to be able to walk through the galleries of the Met on days when it was closed was an incredible experience.

EO

I was revisiting the 1993 Whitney Biennial that you co-curated…

TG

Yes, Elizabeth Sussman led that project with John Hanhardt. We were a team.

EO

Yes, you were a team and collaborated, but it was more about the roster that was of interest to me. The show featured the likes of Spike Lee, Matthew Barney, Robert Gober, Fred Wilson, and Lorna Simpson—all of whom have come to define our contemporary moment. Glenn Ligon was also amongst them. I’m an information hound; I really love knowing how things work—how systems work. And to have known that the art world went from being this space that was largely run by a handful of people. But also this is happening on the heels of, like, the ’80s art movement with Julian Schnabel, a financial recession in the 1970s, and a new New York.

I really want to talk to you about Jeff Koons. I have read Below 14th Street, but I’m also curious about downtown, and The Odeon. It feels like this haunt—culturally—like we’re back in the thick of a lot of similar points of reference to the ’90s.

TG 

Well, I think you're asking me that because Jeff Koons was in Black Male?

EO

I forgot that he was also in the show! I was more just thinking about his references to labor, pop culture, and fascination with spectacle.

TG

Ah, that's often why people ask me, because they find it very surprising that he was included in the show. Fun fact, a fact that I say often that Jeff also does as well—Jeff was in Black Male, with the body of work he made, the found objects of Nike campaigns, again, you know, some of what Black Male was about, this hypervisibility of black masculinity in the culture.

Jeff made those works, and they've been shown in several of his exhibitions. It was very clear to me because one of the ideas about the Black Male, in this kind of representation of masculinity in contemporary art, was thinking about the different ways in which we got to some of those ideas. So, while some people always thought, “Why don't you just make an exhibition of works about Black masculinity about Black men,” but really, it was another conversation. Yeah. So, imagining through that, Jeff was a very important part of that conversation and deeply engaged in it, as were so many of the other artists—Leon Golub was in the exhibition, Mel Chin was in the exhibition—works that, to this day, still haunt me. So precisely right in the space of the exhibition.

EO

I’m specifically thinking about the artist Jeff Koons, not in the context of the Whitney Museum, but who showed in the East Village in the ‘80s. And the way that he showed, and people that he showed with, and the career that he has now. It’s a specific way of working. You seem to have a strategy—what it means to build institutions, and work, while being a representative of them. It's no easy job, navigating those spaces.

And now you’ve done work with the Obama administration, with the White House, and you now sit on the board of the Obama Foundation and are brushing shoulders with politicians and cultural workers. You're also in spaces with architects. Architecture is a very specific mode of production, creating the spaces for people to convene. It's also a level of working that isn't visible—those are such specific rooms. What are the politics of being in those types of rooms? How are you representing your work? Why do you think you’re in those rooms?

TG

Why? Well, you said I had a strategy, and perhaps I do. My strategy has always been about creating space for art, and artists’ work. So, when I'm in those rooms, that's what I'm always endeavoring to do. In some cases, I'm in those rooms because that's what's desired. And that's why I'm invited in—to be able to speak to that. Sometimes it's not yet there and I'm there to help make the space, but it's all in service of that.

For much of my career I was a curator. That's how I still think of myself, as someone who makes meaning through the form of making exhibitions. But really for much longer in my career I've been a museum director, and that role has brought about these other roles. It's still about making space. I've said that for many years, but quite literally what I'm doing now is we're building a building, making space.

EO

But it’s bigger than that…

TG

It's really about not just physical space. Which for me, for the Studio Museum was very important, because it speaks about ideas of cultural autonomy and ownership.

EO

But it’s also the intentionality of it. The reason why MoMA is largely, conceptually, one of my favorite institutions is because it was purpose-built and continues to be rebuilt. There's a synergy when you're walking through a space and someone has actually considered where the windows are, how you're engaging with the art and light. Galleries face this problem, which is why a lot of gallery-going isn't the most desirable, most productive way to spend time with art—as a viewer you can feel that you’re in a space that is being reckoned with in real-time.

On a museum level, having a purpose-built institution also creates a future and this possibility to rebuild and redefine the institution, because the first intervention of rebuilding or building creates and reinforces this narrative that the architecture is essential to the framework of the institution and how it makes a home for the art. And if it doesn't have this reference point, there would never have been a moment of intervening for the Studio Museum to have a purpose-built space in the same regard, right?

TG

I mean, listen. Our old building was a 1914 building, built on 125th Street when it was developed as the Main Street of Uptown. It was built as a bank at its bottom level, and as an office building, with a twentieth century office building structure. Nothing about the building was meant to be a museum, and it was funky in every single way possible. None of the walls were the same height; there was never really a singular or cohesive room, but you could put up some funky walls to offset it, and columns were in the wrong places; air conditioning vents; it was horrific.

As much as I am thrilled to be building a purpose-built building, it's what makes me understand in some ways where I might disagree with you—that sometimes it's really not about the space. And I say that because I think back not just to the twenty-three years I've been at Studio Museum, but its entire 54-year history, in these spaces not created for art, where perhaps they might be, where actual magic happened. The space was just a container. But what occupied that space in art, energy, and ideas is what created it now.

That being said, our roof leaked when it rained too hard, sometimes there was water in the basement—I’m thrilled that we are building, from scratch, a building that will definitely create for the Studio Museum a purpose-built, twenty-first century, truly amazing space. But I also don't want to privilege space-making. It’s a little bit of museum director flex you know, building a building, oh my god. Even when it comes out of my mouth, it’s so museum director-y. [Laughs.]

EO

[Laughs.] Yes, but also, I wanted to speak to the fact that you had a different job when you first encountered the building. Your job wasn't to interpret the space, your job was to facilitate and orchestrate these ideas, and reach for people, reach for things, and cultivate the space. A lot of my friends and I, we're trying to build institutions, we're trying to create new points of reference because a lot of the existing models don't work. In the same way we talked about encountering the Breuer building.

TG

I love 945 Madison Avenue. I still call it the Whitney, but I also still call Citi Field “Shea Stadium.” So you know, I'm one of those people. But I love that building. Again, I'm someone who comes into museum space not always wanting to privilege space. But there are spaces that I do think resonate so deeply with not just the experience one has with what you encounter in the exhibitions, but the space itself. Maybe some of that's nostalgia, because I began my curatorial career there, and my first shows are on those walls.

In the process of designing what is becoming the new Studio Museum, I—along with our amazing team—thought deeply about what we wanted the experience of the Studio Museum to be. Not just a museum, but a museum that was built—born, built—in Harlem, one that has always traversed the relationship between being hyperlocal and super global, and at the same time, an institution that, within our values, is really about what it means to redefine “museum” in its space and content.

To design a building that was going to reflect that, but to do it within very literal confines—because again, we've knocked down our old building, we're building in the exact same lot, we've got basically the same dimensions to work with, we were not even really higher. We're actually replacing. Some things about that are amazing to me, but I had a lot of angst about it—thinking about what it meant to take this space that even though there's not one person who would say, “oh, my gosh, that's such a great building,” there was so much nostalgia and so much love for what people had experienced in it.

There's a lot of emotion about what it meant to knock it down. But also, as we rebuilt it, we wanted to create the opportunity not to erase that sense—because that's also sometimes the relationship of the come up, “we're building this fabulously beautiful, gorgeous building with all these materials”—but, again, I saw some pieces of our old building the other day and I had nostalgia for what that is. And so, it's a part of our process to really reckon with what the space will be.

EO

I'm thinking a bit more in terms of strategy, and about what it signifies, as a gesture. If I’m a businessman—and you were to come to me like, “Hey, I want to rebuild this building,” it's now embedded in the social history of the museum. Everything is all about narrative. The rags to riches, American Dream, the success story—that's just how the world works. We live off of storytelling, right?

From the optics of encountering a building, it's really important to have an institution that has been purpose-built. It changes the possibilities of the encounter and how the institution can make a home for its people. It’s not to say that the Studio Museum just has a brand, but it has the site of production or a site of orientation. So many people know the Studio Museum by name, but haven’t been to it. I almost couldn’t say it… [Laughs.]

TG

But it’s true. Or, they have an impression of it, you know? They have this kind of correlated experience with the Museum. Like when people meet me in person, a lot of the time at first, they say, “Oh my god, I thought you were taller.” When people used to come to the Museum for the first time, they were like, “Oh my God, I thought it was so much bigger.”

EO

[Laughs.] Hello! It’s so real.

TG

Exactly. And part of that is because they had this idea of all the things that had happened there. I think in their minds that then equals a much bigger physical space. But the idea that this relatively small, very modest space contained multitudes—that's why, for me, it is such a privilege to steward, in this moment, an institution that lives so deeply for people. Not just in their specific individual experience, but with the collective. And maybe that’s also one of the things that inspires me—this idea that I don't work in a singular way, but it is about community in all the ways that we can define that.

EO

I want to talk about your institutional history—your shows and exhibitions. But this question hit me earlier, which is about representation? You're advocating for creating spaces for Blackness, right? And The Studio Museum in Harlem is a Black institution located in a historically Black neighborhood. But then how do you create space and new points of reference for Blackness?

This is why I gestured to talking about the post-Black art movement. The post-Black art movement is…. Do you want me to explain it?

TG

You can explain it, because what I'm going to say to you is that—and this is why I don't talk about everything you're going to talk about—it lives in the world outside of my own efforts. That's another thing I love about being a curator and making exhibitions. Once it opens, it's not yours, it lives in the way in which it's interpreted. And I think that's fantastic.

As a curator, I often need a set of ideas that exhibitions live on. When I got to the Studio Museum in 2000, I had spent the entire ‘90s at the Whitney working deeply with a generation of artists that, by the time I got to the Studio Museum in 2000, were all at mid-career. And I in a very personal way wanted to engage with the energy of emerging artists, as an emerging curator. Though, again, the weird thing of my career, the biggest show I probably will ever make happened first. That's how my career began.

Since then, it all lives within the context of something—in relation to the bigness of what Black Male was. But getting to the Studio Museum, I was also deeply interested, as I continue to be, in looking at work by emerging artists and knew that I wanted to make an exhibition that set a platform to open up some space for what I didn't know would be 23 years, but imagined would be the years that followed for me as a curator there. In that, I needed to think deeply about the Black Arts Movement because so much of our life as an institution was cited in that historic moment; we came out of it, we were in response to it—we had different relationships to it. As a curator, thinking about the work I was making, I had to grapple with these moments. Not just art history, but the ways in which Black art histories were being written in response to the exclusions of Black artists.

EO

It’s really this question of subject matter. And I think the obvious thing to me, that I didn't really think about, is that Blackness has been your subject matter and that is why it has had this prophecy to it. What you just said about it being your biggest show first—I think a lot of people feel that and live with that structure. In a way, you're working backwards.

TG

This is why everything I do now is just wild. Because I just think of things and then I'm doing them. Like the kind of big thing, you know, I was 27 years old—and so in a way, it was the most freeing thing ever. In the first three years of my career, basically everything that can happen to many people for their whole career happened. But here's what's so great about it. It meant that I had an incredible amount of freedom to navigate through many different ways of being as a curator. As a Black person in the art world.

EO

In that moment, who freed you?

TG

Me!

EO

When you were at Whitney though, what was the conversation about getting Black Male to happen?

TG

In some ways it'd be a better, as people say, narrative, had it been a struggle—it wasn't. I worked on the ‘93 Biennial, and in that exhibition, we included the video that George Holliday made of Rodney King being assaulted, such a very big conversation. John Hanhardt, who was the film and video curator at the time—legendary media curator.

Remember that was taken with a camcorder, that was the beginning of camcorders being accessible in ways that folks could have them in their homes, and George Holliday had a camcorder. He took that video and John was making an argument about the way the camcorder and video broadly was going to shift the culture. And so, when we were working on the ‘93 Biennial, that was the backdrop.

I can remember going to Los Angeles, working on that ‘93 [Biennial], and the artist Daniel Martinez drove me around South LA. And of course, from New York, I'd seen on TV all that happened. But Danny literally drove me through the streets. There were so many artists who were speaking to me about where their heads were—not necessarily coming out in practice yet, but some where they were seeing resonance in work they've made before.

So it was in that, and there were any number of, you know, signposts along the way—going with Gary Simmons to see Eric B. & Rakim, that moment crystallized a lot of what I thought I understood about hip-hop but became clear. There was the way in which that was the moment of OJ. When I think about all the things that happened in a very short period of time, there wasn't a way it wasn't in people's studios, even if it wasn't about that, who were all thinking about it. It opened deep space that became an exhibition. It didn't have a title at first—the exhibition was titled, for me, in many ways by Greg Tate.

So that's really how it happened. And when I made the presentation to my curatorial colleagues and the director of the Whitney at the time, David Ross, they were deeply open.

EO

I wrote my thesis at Columbia on Jeremy O. Harris’ play Slave Play, which focuses on the performance of language, the body, and architecture. It’s a continuation of this work, where I’m trying to understand the minutiae of what it means to be raced and placed in space and how we reproduce and produce ourselves as people in the world. But also, like earlier in the ‘90s, it's kind of hiding in plain sight with Clarence Thomas, Anita Hill, OJ, and Rodney King stretch of time. Rodney King happened in March of ‘91, and then Clarence Thomas was confirmed in October—like 7 months later.

TG

It felt very compressed. And it impacted, deeply, the way in which I imagined exhibition making—not just what I wanted to make in an exhibition, but also who I wanted to come to see an exhibition. It was on both sides.

EO

This “working backwards”—what has working backwards meant? What do you feel your job is now? Your job has always been the same, because your job is what it was, before you knew what it was. How do you learn?

TG

I think that the most important part of my job as a Director and Chief Curator is, again, to create space for all the possibilities that can happen. So I don't actively curate anymore, but that's actually been fantastic. Because I've had the opportunity to work with a whole generation of amazing young curators who've come through the Studio Museum, and I've learned so much from them. It's expanded the ways in which I think about art and artists and in many ways that's what I love now about being a director.

It’s creating the environment for other people to imagine newly what an institution can be, what a museum is. I dabble, I still once in a while hang a work of art on a wall, and it’s not what I can do or be in an active way and I completely and totally accept that. The privilege of having done such great work so early is that I love what it means now to be able to participate differently. It's very freeing when I go see artists. I basically say there's really nothing I can do—you want to show at the Studio Museum, you have to be having studio visits with our curators.

But I still eagerly and deeply engage with artists, because it helps me to find what I think is necessary when I'm thinking about the institution—not just my own, but in this field broadly. My own trajectory has been one to watch museums shift in radical ways. But it's also a recognition of how much more of a shift needs to happen. That's why I'm so committed to creating space for a generation of museum professionals to be able to work in real ways, to be the leaders who are going to make this change happen.

EO

Speaking of, it reminds me of the conversation I had with Kellie Jones. You worked with her, right?

TG

Yes, I was Kellie's assistant at the Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning in Queens.

EO

She's a professor at Columbia. She talked about how surprising it is to exist in the world and have art be so deeply embedded in pop culture now. Like, “Oh that's Mickalene Thomas in Sex and the City ["And Just Like That."] reboot.” You know what I mean? Having that sort of pronounced reverence—I’m not saying that it’s destabilizing, but how do we grapple with that? It's weird, because your career actually does echo a lot of what art is now. What happened to Black Male is, wildly, what is happening with art. How do you reckon with what art is now?

TG

I don't know that I do. There are just some things I've decided just not to worry about. There are some big questions that everyone always wants to grapple with, and I am just so much more invested in getting the work done. I think that sometimes makes me not want to grapple with the big questions—not that they're not important, and not that I don't feel it's important that some people are grappling with them—but I feel that so much of the true work is incremental and has to be super intentional. And that's where much of my energy is spent.

EO

But what does that even mean?

TG

It means getting stuff done. Right? For me, for example, we are still in a place in this field where what it means to think about representation in really profound ways, is still…

EO

What is it?

TG

I think what it means is that it stops being performative. And it invests more people, and different people, with the actual power that continues to move our culture world forward. I don't think institutions change, I don't think the academy changes without that. But for that to happen, we also have to create the space for people to do their best work and be supported in it.

So what that looks like and what that means is often what shapes my thinking about how I should and need to show up to create the kind of museum world, the kind of art world, the kind of cultural world that is a macro sense of the sort of micro world that I have inherited–that the people who founded the Studio Museum thought. They saw an idea of what they thought was possible, and without fortune or collection, or very much other than a huge amount of cultural capital they made that happen.

EO

But that exists in the elements of Black Male—what makes it work is that it's a show in an institution, in a context that is concerning Blackness conceptually. It deals with Blackness as a subject matter, but it also does so critically and conceptually. Whereas now in a lot of curatorial work, very seldom are people grappling with or considering these variables. Having a concept defines the project and its longevity. Because so much stuff doesn't have a concept. It's just flat—let's put a bunch of Black people in a show.

TG

Well, that’s just bad curating.

EO

I know, but I'm like, can we teach the girls about the necessity of concept? The concepts are lacking. I'm not a curator simply because I've always thrived on that adjacency. The reason why I’ve brought up this two-prong aspect of the show is that there's the show conceptually, but then there is the representation of the work and community. Because you don't actually know whose work is whose when you first encounter it. I mean, canonically, when you walk in, you can see a Koons, sure, but you don't necessarily know who that work is made by. You have to encounter it on the merits of its presence. But the point is, we need both. We need Black curators curating work. We need any person of color curating for curation’s sake, and actually executing conceptual ideas that don't necessarily engage race. And we also need—

TG

We need it all.

EO

How are those conversations happening among the higher ups who are in these institutions? How do you make sense of this lack, or this lag?

TG

I think those conversations are happening. The shifts we've seen in who's occupying curatorial positions—my hope is that that continues, and my work has been to create the space for it to continue. But it's also about the bigger idea, which is simply, what do we imagine museums should be? We're at a place where that has shifted, and those shifts are not coming from inside the field. They're coming from our public. The relationship to what it means to serve a public has changed radically. So even the notion that, as curators, how we understand and think about the audience is about how we can embrace the complexity of what it means to be speaking to many different people through our exhibitions. And the way our institutions have to be multivoiced as well.

EO

It’s funny, this is the perfect ending because of this adjacency—studying architecture and being so well versed in art theory and so many different theoretical dispositions—so much of pop culture, and so much of culture more broadly, has been resolved in art as a field. Representation, over-identifying, the lack of performance, all of these different dispositions on language and the failures of language, have really been grappled with in the fields of art—or writing about art specifically, in Greg Tate, and language, and what language is supposed to do—but it hasn't happened in other places. Specifically, architecture. So few people get to build, and get to building. How do you feel art understands itself, as a person in the field of art engaging with politicians, talking about these problems with representation? How do you see the theory that you’ve practiced? How do you see that manifesting?

TG

You’re saying I’m talking to politicians—I’m not sure what politicians that you are talking about that I’m speaking to. I'm glad that I get to spend lots of time in the culture world, not so much time in the political world. I guess if the conversations are the same—it's kind of where we started—I feel I have been able to work in ways that kind of make the mission manifest. I think that the conversations I have, that are really about what I think, are about the importance of understanding the space of art in the larger discourse. In some ways that sounds like one of these nice ways of speaking, but I mean it in a profound way.

That comes to me as someone who not just works in Harlem, but lives in Harlem—who sees the work that I get to do, with a number of really amazing people, in real time. And by that, I mean understanding the place in which, in real time, institutions can matter, exhibitions can matter, their relationship to art for many people can be truly, truly powerful and incredibly profound. And that's what I try to talk about—what makes this all important, and why it should matter and how it can. I continue to find the possibility in that through my own deep engagement, with my relationship to objects, and to the people that make them—artists. If there's one through line in everything I've done, it's that: the relationship to an ongoing conversation with art and artists in ways that have profoundly shaped me in every way.

Q&A SECTION

EO

Thank you! We can take your questions.

Audience Member 1

So, back to the beginning, when we were talking about the internet and our culture—I work in the virtual space, so I'm curious to know your point of view. Having observed artists over time and seeing art evolve over time—considering Instagram and how much content would you take in every single day—do you feel that artists are inspired by pop culture right now, or that artists are creating pop culture? What is that relationship?

TG

I think it's the whole range. I think some artists are creating it—it's their work. That's inspiring pop culture. I think other artists are consuming it deeply. I think some artists have an ambivalent relationship to it, not just about culture, but the consumption of it, and others live utterly outside of it. Some artists I engage with are absolutely outside of it. This does feel so predominant, and the languages of our world are so impacted by it. But I really am seeing a range. And I have to say, often people ask me if I see that range based on age, and sure, somewhat, but not entirely.

Audience Member 1

Do you feel that affects the value of the art? I mean, probably not. But it affects their relationship to pop culture and Instagram, specifically, and influencer culture. Do you feel like that affects how you feel affects the art in some way? Do you have any opinion on it?

TG

I don't, you know. The reason I don't have an opinion is because everything about me generationally means that I should probably say something to you about how “it's terrible, it's awful.” And at a certain point, I'm just not sure how productive that is. Yes, as I consume, there's a lot that I'm always navigating. I'm sure you know, some of your parents probably say, “I'm so glad there wasn't Instagram when I was a young kid,” but I am. I am deeply. But on the other hand, I profoundly believe that we are witnessing what some of this means, and that's why I’m not willing to judge it too quickly as 100% bad. Again, I'm in many rooms where, of course, that's exactly what the sentiment is and the sentiment can be, but I just don't think that's that interesting. It’s just me. With my own consumption level, I'm at a point where there's only so much more new I can have. So if I go on Apple Music hip-hop, I don't know who any of those artists are. There was just a day—I don't know what it was, but it wasn't recently, I'm gonna say it's probably like 2007 or something—where I realized the hard drive was full. Systems up, I just couldn't quite consume any more. And so this is where I do depend, and count on, and love working with younger people, because I really need that curated for me. I do really believe that that's also the way of a kind of transference of information in ways that are really interesting.

EO

You’re engaged, but you know how to ask the right questions, about that being brought to you.

TG

No, I don’t, it's more than just horrify myself. Because I sound some days like my mother used to sound when she would mess up Earth, Wind and Fire, she would say, “Spring, Summer, Rain.” My brother and I would be mortified. But I mess up the name of rappers constantly, and I have to be corrected. Like, no, it's Lil Baby. Not “Small Baby.” But that horrifies me. It truly does. Marcia Tucker had a theory–Marcia Tucker, who was the founder of the New Museum, who had been a curator at the Whitney, who was fired from her job at the Whitney in the ‘70s for being an incredible radical in that space at that moment. Marcia was a great mentor to me, and so when I was a the curator in the ‘90s and lost my job, her path was mine. But Marcia had a theory that curators should work with artists of their generation, and stay with them through their career. So yes, she believed deeply that that was the most profound way to engage with culture. And she felt it for art because she was a museum person. But when pressed on this, she would say the same across culture. So if you were a theater director, you should work with the play. Marcia really hung on to that. And sometimes I think about that, this idea of, “at what point do we fully embrace, or do we fully reject?” It’s not what I've done, you know, I've been thrilled to work with artists on both sides—artists who are much older than I was, when I was a young curator, and now I work with artists of a completely different generation.

Audience Member 2

We talked about rebuilding museums. I'm wondering if this process of renovation and rebuilding has given you an opportunity to think about how the mission and spirit of the museum will evolve beyond the space?

TG

It has. But it's challenging, because I also have so much nostalgia for what the museum was. I vacillate between these two points, one of which is how to hold some of that, knowing that we are getting this new building that's going to be shiny and beautiful and gorgeous—how do we hold some of what was that sense of spirit in that space? But at the same time, I've equally been doing what you've said, which is what does it mean to think about who we are beyond the physical walls—even though we're building these very beautiful, very expensive physical walls–who are we beyond? In some ways, when I think of the institution and the way in which I work into the mission, it is physical, but it's also about the emotional, the intellectual, the spiritual. There was a way in which, when we were in the architectural brief and picking an architect for this—I am not an architect, and again, not a museum director who had thought about building forever—so, someone told me, “Oh, the brief,” I assumed the brief was gonna be me waxing poetic for 20 pages about what a museum means. And it was like, no. It's gonna say how many seats you need in the classrooms, for the kids, how big the freight elevator needs to be, and how many people can be on the stairwell at one time. The brief was, like, 200 pages of that. And I was just like, “really?” So I added to it, and added not just the set of sort of conceptual ideas that I wanted to inherit in the building, but also these ideas of what site could be. We created an institution that was site-suggested, site-sensitive, super site-specific. That also for me was about, in that process, saying, “what is it we are that's beyond the physicality of the museum, and how do we play more into that?” So yes, there's very much it's been at the core. And of course, our building is [arriving] a little later than we thought it would be. Because we had this big pause. But I have to say it's in that moment that a lot of this began to really gel into what I think is becoming who we are, as we get closer to opening.

Audience Member 3

I'm just curious as to what motivated you to get together Freestyle, specifically, as I really liked that exhibit a lot. When you were conceptualizing the show, were you considering the “post-Black.” movement? What were your motivations when you first started at the museum?

TG

It simply was that I started working at the Studio Museum as Deputy Director for Exhibitions and Programs in January of 2000. There was a schedule already in place until about, say, January of 2001 or a little after that, like March. I had to begin to think of new exhibitions come the spring. There were a lot of ways I thought about the symbolism of what it was and what I was going to do first. It was very clear to me that on one level I at first thought that I wanted to honor the Museum's past, and I actually did get to do that because I had to hang the collection. In that collection hanging, I was able to really engage with some of the artists who stand at the core of who we are as an institution, artists like Jacob Lawrence, Norman Lewis, Elizabeth Catlett, Faith Ringgold. And so I did that first. And then second, I wanted to do, basically a group show. I’d come from the Whitney Biennial and I didn't want to call it a biennial because I didn't know at that point if I was going to be able to make it happen again. So I created, with Christine Y. Kim, a group show where we spent eight months traveling around the country, looking at artists, and working a lot through referrals from other artists. But really positioning what we thought in that moment could be an exhibition, which opened up the space for the Studio Museum to reimagine itself in relation to new work and younger artists, opened in May of 2001. We’d just come through what had been all of the hype about the new millennia. Even with that as an idea, that's what made it happen. I wouldn't say that when we did Freestyle, we knew we would keep going with “F” shows. But quickly after Freestyle opened, it became clear. And so we did Frequency, then Flow, then Fore, then Fictions.

EO

I interviewed Hamza Walker last year and we spoke about Freestyle. He said long after he contributed to the catalog, he dealt with the residue of that thinking for over ten years, and to this day it’s something he revisits.

TG

It was a moment to explore as a curator in this institution, because here's the truth of it: I spent over a decade at the Whitney Museum and I was also grappling with what it meant to enter into a culturally specific museum, what I could be and should be in that space and what it could be for artists. And so Freestyle was a way into that.

Audience Member 4

I'm someone that really appreciates the ephemeral and documentative aspect of it, and so on. I like to collect different things that are going to be reflective and documentation of our time, especially pop culture that got touched on. Do you feel like it's of concern that since things are no longer tangible, no physical aspect and more digital now in terms of flyers and advertising? Working for museums or galleries, whatever it may be, do you feel like that's a potential lost art? Because now, what used to be in newspapers or flyers that you would find in the street that “Andy Warhol is going to be exhibiting at said museum” is not going to be buried on the Instagram of MoMA. Now in a digital format. You spoke about how social media and the internet killed printmaking, in a way, more specifically zines. Do you ever feel that’s something to be concerned about? And what that would look like in terms of, how are you going to present like, “Hey I went to this exhibit, to see this artist…”

TG

I do, but what's interesting to your exact point is that I do keep everything, and we have a whole system for how it gets filed. But I look at how much smaller that is year after year. When I look back at the boxes from say 1998, there are not dozens, but there's probably like 12. But in recent years, it’s much smaller. So I do think that's an issue, also because I am so deeply obsessed with the archive—as someone who has worked with mid-century and prior Black artists. The only way to curate into those pasts has come from the archive, and generally not always established archives, but rather the archives that individual people have because they do have the vision that this will be important in the future. So, someone like the artist Benny Andrews—who kept every exhibition announcement of shows with Black artists from the mid ‘60s all the way through the ‘80s, and filed them methodically by the artists' name—would go to galleries and ask them if there was a card. Or, he might say, “can I have three?” and put them into these files, which we now have in the archive. Benny gave all of that to the museum. And it's invaluable.

So, yes, I do worry in this moment, about what happens to the traces of those things that are not documented in other ways. How they're known. I also worry about it in the way that we all mark our own sort of relationship to things in moments. I shock myself all the time with the very specific memories of things that come from the fact that I still have some tangible artifacts.

EO

It allows for some sort of cultural amnesia…

TG

But just, you know, correspondence. My first job in a museum was like many people, as a curatorial assistant. At the Whitney, I was Richard Armstrong's assistant. And in the average day, I probably typed 10, or 12 letters, because everything happened through correspondence, which was tangible. Then there were files of all those letters. And in that correspondence, whether it be around exhibition making, or a loan, or acquisition, and I worry about how much of that is lost now. And in that loss, we lose the traces of how things actually come to be, which never are as they appear when we see them as a finished object.

Aria Dean

My question is kind of big and probably too big for this context. I’m thinking of what you’re talking about, the Studio Museum and Black Arts Movement as this very incremental history. How do you characterize the long history of Black art in America that we as artists, curators, writers, etc. will inherit? Do you think there are moments that are more open and moments that are more closed, historically? Specifically in terms of discourse amongst artists, the way politics and culture collide in the art world. Do you think it’s very linear, and there is a progressive arc towards openness, or a pendulum, or cyclical motion?

TG

Pendulum. Deep pendulum. And again, I don’t want to speak that into existence completely. But this is what both history and art history have taught me. This is what the archive shows me is the real pendulum. And perhaps that's important, right? There are these moments that perhaps don't exist as this forward movement—they feel regressive. But what history has shown us is that sometimes those moments where things have regressed, they've also moved ahead. It's like a rubber band back-and-forth. The Studio Museum was founded in ‘68. It was another moment of a wave of attention towards Black artists and Black culture, but by ‘74 it all had gone away. And then we get to the ‘80s, and multiculturalism comes. And that opens, but it's characterized differently. It ends because then the art world concerns itself with a kind of internationalism and globalism. And so we exist within these. But I also think this is one of the things I love about leading a culturally specific museum and living within the context of what is the broader scope of Black institutions—there's also this thing about creating one's own world, and that lives outside of that time. Not time, but, for example—my brother and I were always advocating to my mother to do something, something that we knew she was going to say no to. And after we went through our basic arguments about why she didn't let us do it, we'd say something like, “well, Emmanuel's mother let him do it.” That was the wrong thing to say, because she said, “that's at Emmanuel's mother's house, not my house.” Meaning, “this is the universe we are operating in.” And this is created by me. This is one of the things I love across the culturally-specific institution world, is—because I see other media at different moments of this pendulum—we continue to make the work and make the space to present the work, and steward it, and tend it, and care for it. Create space not in relation to that pendulum. If I say one thing, the show that everybody has to go see, like tomorrow—is the Just Above Midtown: Changing Spaces show at the Museum of Modern Art. Nothing makes sense more, of every single thing I know and believe, than that exhibition, and that's a perfect example of operating outside of grappling with where the pendulum might be around these thoughts, but about creating a world and tending to that world so that it creates the space for all the things that are needed.

EO

[Laughs.] We’re really done, but I forgot to ask about David Hammons.

TG

You can’t ask that as the last question. Because what can I say other than, you know, “Essential, in every single way.”

EO

I was reading about his African American Flag, and the hang in MoMA. It was a conversation where you were speaking with a curator about the placement of the flag at MoMA at the time, while Hammons’ flag has canonically hung outside the Studio Museum in Harlem since 2004. I love this question because it talks about the materiality of objects, and the things that it's meant to survive. This curator was like, “Oh, how should we hang the flag at MoMA?” And Thelma was like, “They’re two different flags.” They have two different material constructions, our flag is made to endure, to live outside.

TG

David created our flag to be a flag. And I think, for an artist whose version of Conceptualism is gospel to me, that was the most conceptual statement ever. He, like, made a flag—it’s a flag. And so, it lives on our flagpole, as a flag, representing him and his artwork, etc., but quite literally.

EO

It's not a symbolic gesture that’s meant to deteriorate over time–it’s meant to endure. Thank you!