Thelma Golden

[4] From 1991 to 1998, Golden was a curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, where she gained a reputation for promoting young black conceptual artists.

[9] As a student, Golden helped put several exhibitions together at the Smith College Museum of Art, including one called Dorothy C. Miller: With an Eye to American Art, about the "Americans" exhibitions of MoMA curator Dorothy Canning Miller.

[10] Golden also worked as an intern at The Studio Museum in 1985, where she cataloged the papers of painter Benny Andrews among other tasks.

[13][14] Golden later looked back at the show as a "transformative experience" that helped her see how "art and artists can exist in a museum space in a way that is radical and powerful and can create change because of the work.

"[11] The following year, Golden curated a show that would become still more controversial: Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art (1994–95).

[14] It included artworks by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Robert Mapplethorpe, Glenn Ligon, Dawn DeDeaux, and David Hammons, as well as films such as Gordon Parks' Shaft and Marlon Riggs' Tongues Untied.

[15] In a rarer positive review, art historian Linda Nochlin described it in ARTnews as "one of the liveliest and most visually engaging exhibitions" of the season.

[17] The New York Times noted that the show was bringing unusually large black audiences to the museum, but that the artwork left them polarized in their reactions.

[1] In November 1998, Golden and fellow curator Elisabeth Sussman resigned from their positions after not being assigned portfolios by new museum director Maxwell L.

[18] At the museum, Golden organized exhibitions including Isaac Julien: Vagabondia (2000); Martin Puryear: The Cane Project (2000); Glenn Ligon: Stranger (2001); Black Romantic: The Figurative Impulse in Contemporary Art (2002); harlemworld: Metropolis as Metaphor (2004); Chris Ofili: Afro Muses (2005);[22] Frequency (2005–06),[1] with Christine Y. Kim; Africa Comics (2006–07); and Kori Newkirk: 1997–2007 (2007–08).

[24] Its attendance increased 27% in the first decade of Golden's tenure as director,[1] and the museum added more than 2000 new works to its collection.

[25] Exhibitions that Golden organized for the Studio Museum began to tour internationally to cities including Boston, Houston, Philadelphia, Toronto, and Chicago.

[11] In 2017, MoMA director Glenn D. Lowry credited Golden with having made the Studio Museum "a national institution".

Golden serves on the Graduate Committee at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, is a member of the Association of Art Museum Directors,[9] is on the boards of Creative Time in New York and the Institute of International Visual Arts (inIVA) in London, and was a 2008 Henry Crown Fellow at the Aspen Institute.

[25] A representative for the prize, Tom Eccles, praised Golden for "raising issues and developing ideas that are central to our time".