When Glenn Lowry retires from MoMA (2025, anyone?), Thelma Golden will surely sit at the top of the list of his potential successors. Golden has ably stewarded the Studio Museum of Harlem for the past 15 years, renewing its curatorial and educational programming (Legacy Russell was appointed associate curator in 2018), creating one of the most sought-after residency programmes in the US and updating its physical plant with a $122m purpose-built, David Adjaye-designed building. This year she was invited to join an elite group of Black museum trustees in the creation of the Black Trustee Alliance for Art Museums (Golden sits on the board of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art), funded by the Mellon and Ford foundations, whose aims are the cultivation of new Black talent at all levels of visual art practice and administration – something Golden knows well, as this has been her mission since beginning her career in the arts in 1987 as an intern at the museum she now leads.
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