Thelma Golden (born 1965 in St. Albans, Queens) is the Director and Chief Curator of The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York City, United States. Golden joined the Museum as Deputy Director for Exhibitions and Programs in 2000 before succeeding Dr. Lowery Stokes Sims, the Museum's former Director and President, in 2005. She is noted as one of the originators of the term Post-Blackness.
Thelma Golden grew up in Queens, New York. She had her first hands-on training as a senior in high school at the New Lincoln School, training as a curatorial apprentice at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Golden's decision to become a curator was inspired by Lowery Stokes Sims, the first African-American curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She graduated from Buckley Country Day School in 1980 and earned a B.A. in Art History and African-American Studies from Smith College in 1987. Golden helped put several exhibitions together at the Smith College Museum of Art as a student, including one called "Dorothy C. Miller: With an Eye to American Art", which chronicled the groundbreaking contributions of her signature ‘Americans’ exhibitions. While at Smith, she worked as an intern at The Studio Museum in 1985.
Golden's first curatorial position was at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1987. She was then a curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art from 1988 to 1998. Golden was the visual arts director at the Jamaica Arts Center in Queens before she became director of the Whitney Museum's outpost in midtown Manhattan (since closed) in 1991. She organized many notable exhibitions, including the controversial 1993 Biennial, directed by Elisabeth Sussman; Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary Art (1994–95); Bob Thompson: A Retrospective (1998); Heart, Mind, Body, Soul: New Work from the Collection (1998); and Hindsight: Recent Work from the Permanent Collection (1999).

Return to Thelma Golden Autograph Profile