Inside the Studio Museum in Harlem's showcase of Black art history in America

Geoff Bennett:

It is a celebration, as well as a reckoning. The Studio Museum in Harlem reopened this fall after seven years in a new building that showcases its history of highlighting Black artists, a history and project credited with helping change and diversify the art world.

Senior arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown visited the museum for our arts and culture series, Canvas.

Jeffrey Brown:

Today, Thelma Golden is a widely respected and much loved figure in the art world. But everyone has to start somewhere. And as it happens, an important somewhere for her was as a young intern at the very place she's now led for 20 years, The Studio Museum in Harlem.

Thelma Golden, Director, The Studio Museum in Harlem: This museum opened up a world for me, because here was this museum that was founded so specifically to steward the work of Black artists.

And what I encountered here as a young person was a group of people who were so passionately committed with so much purpose and that were doing it in ways that didn't ever occur to me were possible.

Jeffrey Brown:

All these years later, Golden is presiding over the reopening of the museum in a stunning new $160 million building that somehow fits into its former site on 125th Street in the heart of Harlem, an historic center of Black American life and culture, seven floors, doubling its former exhibition space, offering multiple pathways in a design by Adjaye Associates, a large lobby with a neon Me We by artist Glenn Ligon.

A roof garden with stunning views out over Manhattan skylines, water towers and church steeples included. But the underlying story remains how the studio from its founding in 1968 helped change what's seen on museum and gallery walls around the world.

Thelma Golden:

The Studio Museum was necessary because the contributions of artists of African descent were not being adequately acknowledged. Works were not being collected or shown in institution. Art histories were often excluding some of the major voices.

Jeffrey Brown:

They were there. They were doing their work.

Thelma Golden:

They were doing their work. They were there. There was a century of contribution, but quite often art history was not including them. And The Studio Museum, our founders, were part of a larger movement which really looked at what it meant to revise the canon.

Jeffrey Brown:

An archival exhibition now captures some of that history, its founding in a loft over a liquor store by a group of artists and philanthropists amid the turmoil of the 1960s and the civil rights movement, the move in the early '80s to its present site, a former bank building.

One of the first artists shown in 1968, Tom Lloyd, who created electric light sculptures, is now honored with a solo exhibition in the new space. The main exhibition, titled From Now: A collection in Context, contains works by early pioneers such as Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence, Elizabeth Catlett, and later generations who've burst the seams of the art world and drawn international attention.

A few among very many, painters Kerry James Marshall and Jean-Michel Basquiat, photographers Carrie Mae Weems and Dawoud Bey, sculptor Barbara Chase-Riboud. It also captures the diversity of Black art, political, as in David Hammons' Pray For America, and personal, Tom Feelings' Mother and Child, representational, Barkley Hendricks' Lawdy Mama, and abstract, William T. Williams' Train.

Thelma Golden:

There is no one way we can describe Black art. That is where we understand the sort of multiplicity of voices, the multiplicity of ways of seeing and imagining.

Jeffrey Brown:

Another exhibition celebrates The Studio Museum's artist in residence program, which has given space, time and support to more than 150 artists, and helped launch many international careers, including that of 36-year-old Jordan Casteel, who grew up in Denver knowing of the museum's history before coming to New York as a young artist.

Jordan Casteel, Artist:

Word on the street amongst artists was so attached to what this museum had done for them, either personally or a place that they would visit, a sense that they could feel themselves and belong to them. Whether they were a resident or not, it didn't matter. They ultimately all felt a sense of belonging. And I think...

Jeffrey Brown:

And you wanted to be a part of that.

Jordan Casteel:

And I wanted to be a part of that. I desperately wanted to be a part of that. And when I got the call from Thelma Golden, I remembered thinking this was a moment that could change my life forever.

Jeffrey Brown:

One of the paintings Casteel made during her residency, a portrait of Kevin the kite man, a man she saw every day out her window across 125th Street. It became part of a series of paintings of local figures with a goal of representing the neighborhood, bringing its people and life inside the museum.

Jordan Casteel:

I wanted to create that bridge quite literally in terms of the representation, the furthering of the bridge of what this institution meant for me and wanting to share it out onto the street to the people that I was meeting.

Jeffrey Brown:

That sense of being a part of Harlem is crucial here and scenes of its life are everywhere, in Lorraine O'Grady's Art Is series, and an exhibit titled Harlem Postcards, photographs by local and visiting artists over several decades.

Christopher Myers, Artist:

Harlem has always been this kind of like gathering place of people thinking and people doing and this museum has been a nexus for decades.

Jeffrey Brown:

Artist and writer Christopher Myers remembers coming here as a child with his father, Walter Dean Myers, the renowned author of books for children and young adults. Now Christopher has created a commission work for the museum's new education center, where children will come for school and after-school visits.

His large paintings on steel titled Harlem Is a Myth portray local figures. The famous such as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and everyday, young girls in front of a movie theater, giving them mythological wings and other traits.

Christopher Myers:

I'm thinking about just the kind of mythic resonance of all those people.

Jeffrey Brown:

I mean, literally because you're making them into mythic characters.

Christopher Myers:

Of course. And I feel like sometimes we lose sight of the specialness of what it means to be part of a myth like Harlem,and especially for young people to understand that they need to imagine themselves to be larger than their environment, larger than their world. They need to imagine themselves to be as big as Harlem.

Jeffrey Brown:

If The Studio Museum originally opened in one period of turmoil in the 1960s, it reopens in another amid attacks on diversity programs, museums and how American history and culture are presented.

Thelma Golden:

It continues the resolve for what it means to have public institutions that are committed to what it means to create space, right, in moments like this. Our archive keeps telling me so much from the past of where this is exactly where our founders were in 1968, so also thinking about this as the legacy of this institution, right, to continue to work in ways that promote those sort of widest ideals of democracy and justice.

Jeffrey Brown:

On the one hand, the museum celebrates its success in helping widen the lens of the larger art world. On the other, Golden insists the necessity of a museum capturing the vision and voices of Black artists is as strong as ever.

For the "PBS News Hour," I'm Jeffrey Brown at The Studio Museum in Harlem.