Back Talk: Thelma Golden

Adrian Bellesguard

Thelma Golden has been the director of the Studio Museum in Harlem since 2005 and a curator there since 2000. This year, the museum--founded as an institution devoted to African-American art and artifacts of the African diaspora--celebrated its fortieth anniversary. The museum is featuring a retrospective on the photorealist painter Barkley Hendricks, who showed early works there in the 1980s.

In 1994 you curated an exhibition at the Whitney called "Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art." Have the concerns of black artists shifted away from identity politics in the past fifteen years?

Identity politics is a problematic catchword. All work in some ways is involved in identity politics--the question is just what is chosen to be centralized and becomes labeled as such, and what then is marginalized and then becomes labeled as such. Thinking about race and gender and identity has shifted, but that's because the world has shifted. It's not a shift specific to black artists. The way in which artists work in any particular moment is contextual. An African-American artist working in 1968 was working in a different context than 2008.

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