Category: Museum Director
Nationality: American
Last Year: 73
Being associated with a new idea can last your whole career. Thelma Golden, director and chief curator of New York’s Studio Museum in Harlem, made her name curating the controversial Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art at the Whitney in 1995, and has since become the leading curatorial voice of an emerging ‘post-black’ generation of African American artists. Under her directorship, the Studio Museum has pushed confidently on, with critically well-regarded solo exhibitions by Kalup Linzy and Shinique Smith in 2009. How Golden will navigate the cultural politics of race under the first ‘post-white’ American President will be worth watching.