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COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Thelma Golden likes art, and knows about art, but the thing she wants to do, on as large a scale as possible, is curate -- which is to say influence, edit, or, to use her mother's phrase, "get in other people's business." Golden is the person colleagues ask to help with the seating plan for a black-tie dinner. She shouts at the man at the end of her street who will not stop feeding the pigeons. At an opening, wearing a pink-and-orange Diane von Furstenberg dress, she will scold an overloaded artist, "Be an artist. Check your bag!" Or she can turn you against an imperfect in-flight cookie: "What do you mean, 'It's not bad'? It's not good. It's not great. If it's not a great cookie, why eat it?"
Art curators used to be connoisseurs -- second-born sons of privilege, "whose families were trying to keep them off the proverbial streets of Monte Carlo," as a former director of the Whitney Museum, David A. Ross, recently put it. Art curators are now brokers. They are charmers and negotiators and fund-raisers, working in a world where it sometimes seems that there are more art institutions than there are great works of art to fill them. There were certainly curators in the past who moved in the public sphere, and who paid attention to living artists -- people like the MOMA curator Dorothy Miller, whom Golden particularly admires. But today the curator looks more and more like a museum director -- someone deep in the money scuffle that has long accompanied the production and distribution of art. Curators have to fight for air: eat lunch with billionaire collectors, drag trustees through the Venice Biennale, appear on the "Charlie Rose" show.
Some find this intolerable, and some find it stimulating, but it is unlikely that anyone is quite as cheerful about the way things have turned out as Golden, the deputy director and chief curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem. Golden, who likes to use the word "multitask," seems almost eerily stimulated by the coincidence of disposition and job description, and to spend time with her is to follow in her wake like a minion needing a signature from a striding executive in a nineteen-forties office melodrama. Not everyone would have thought, as Golden did, of laying imperial foundations on a fairly neglected corner (the African-American corner) of perhaps the least welcoming of contemporary arts. They might have looked for a place where fewer men wear loafers without socks. But Golden, whose ambition is both extreme and matter-of-fact, knows that curating modern art pulls you into conversations with people who have cash and power, and that the curator with ambitions beyond art -- and with natural political skills -- is entitled to entertain ideas of world domination. "Other curators just make their shows," an artist told her recently. "But I think you think your mission is to find good artists." Golden laughed. "No," she said. "I'm changing the world."
Golden, who sometimes calls herself a "producer," understands how to have an impact. At the Whitney, where she worked from 1991 to 1998, she was known for her championing of young black conceptual artists, and for including them in the Whitney Biennial in 1993 and in the "Black Male" show of 1994 -- high-profile exhibitions that opened the museum's door to the then modish currents of multiculturalism and identity politics. And now the Studio Museum, which Golden joined two years ago, is shaking off its reputation as an earnest gallery on the edge of the known art world; she has made the museum matter. Her greatest success there has been an exhibition of a new generation of artists whom she calls (with partial irony) "post-black"; these are artists who have muted or rerouted the explicitly racial agenda of their predecessors.
"You know when you're making whipped cream, and it's liquid, and there's that moment just before it becomes the cream?" Golden asked me. "That's the moment I work in. I have to be in motion." She sits on the federal committee that selects the artists who will represent America at international biennials. She speaks at conferences. She poses for fashion shoots in O and Harper's Bazaar. She chats at parties with Spike Lee and Wynton Marsalis and friends who work in publishing...
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