Who

Art world powerhouse Thelma Golden is the director and chief curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem.

Backstory

Golden got involved with museums early on, taking a curatorial apprenticeship at the Met as an Upper East Side high school student. After graduating from Smith with a BA in art history and African-American studies, she interned at the Studio Museum in Harlem, which led to a curatorial assistant job at the Whitney. Following a brief stint at the Jamaica Arts Center, Golden moved back to the Whitney, and in 1991 she became the museum's first African-American curator at the age of 25. She left the Whitney unexpectedly in 1998 after a staff reorganization by the museum's new director, Maxwell Anderson. Collector Peter Norton quickly swooped in and offered her a post as his curator of special projects, a job she held for a year before returning to the Studio Museum as a curator in 2000. When Lowery Stokes Sims stepped down as the Studio Museum's director in 2005, Golden replaced her.

Of note

An art world icon not least because she's a stylish black woman in a profession dominated by dull white men, Golden has established a reputation in recent years as the preeminent arbiter and champion of black artists. With 2001's "Freestyle" and 2005's "Frequency," she spotlighted works by emerging talents like Kehinde Wiley, Shinique Smith, Kalup Linzy, and Karyn Olivier; she's also mounted well-received solo exhibitions by established artists like Chris Ofili and Stan Douglas. In addition to her work at the Studio Museum, Golden manages to get in some teaching time on the side: She's on the faculty at Bard College's Center for Curatorial Studies and serves as an adjunct professor at the School of the Arts at Columbia University.

Drama

Golden was at the center of an art world hubbub when her 1994 exhibition at the Whitney, "Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary Art," hit a cultural hot-button around the same time as the Rodney King riots and O.J. trial. The show, which included 100 works by multiracial artists, generated extreme reactions: The Observer's Hilton Kramer called it the kind of show that rendered the Whitney "completely irrelevant" for people who "continue to be more interested in artistic quality than political outreach." The controversy became so intense that Golden took refuge in a Miami hotel.

In person

A self-described "complete total control freak," the chic and petite Golden (she's five foot and a hundred pounds) is a regular on the party pages of Style.com and the New York Times.

Personal

In January '08 Golden married Nigerian-born, London-based designer Duro Olowu; the artist Glenn Ligon and Paper magazine's Kim Hastreiter were witnesses at the "surprise" wedding, for which the bride wore a dress of Oluwu's design. Golden lives in Park Slope, where she doesn't have much art on the walls. "I can't live with art: I'd spend too much time tweaking it."