African American culture

Barely a few hours after a Socialist mayor of Indian origin was elected to lead New York City, another politically crucial event was taking place in the same megalopolis, this time in the field of art. In northern Manhattan, in Harlem, the historic epicentre of African American culture, many prominent figures flocked to visit the new Studio Museum. Dedicated to Black artists, it was founded in 1968, at a time when painters and sculptors of colour were completely ignored in art history textbooks.

Spike Lee

That evening, the filmmaker and tireless champion of the cause, Spike Lee, was wandering through the exhibition galleries, confirming his interest in the institution, which he evokes in the opening scene of his latest film, released in France in September 2025, Highest 2 Lowest. Historically, the Studio Museum showed its collection in the difficult context of premises housed in a former bank.

300-million-dollar fundraising

The Studio Museum

After closing in 2018 and a long 300-million-dollar fundraising campaign, the museum’s seven new floors were inaugurated in November 2025. The 7,500 square metres were originally designed by David Adjaye, the Ghanaian-British architect knighted by Queen Elizabeth in 2017. The project for a new Studio Museum was beset with obstacles. Beyond the arduous fundraising, in July 2023 the star architect was hit by scandal. He was accused of sexual harassment. Clearly, for the sake of appearances, it is his firm, Adjaye Associates, together with the executive architect, Cooper Robertson, that has been brought to the fore as claiming authorship of the remarkable building.

Dr Martin Luther King Jr Boulevard

Harlem

On West 125th Street, also known as Dr Martin Luther King Jr Boulevard, not far from the Apollo Theater, which launched Ella Fitzgerald and Stevie Wonder, the black concrete façade appears as a stack of irregular rectangles into which large picture windows are set. It is topped by a magnificent tree-planted terrace that offers a panoramic view over the skyline of what people here call the Harlem “community”. Inside, the large lifts and staircases edged with bronze inevitably recall the Breuer Building in which the Whitney Museum made its Manhattan home in 1966 (1).

Thelma Golden

It is also there that Thelma Golden first worked, the true driving force behind the Studio Museum, the institution’s director who has become a legendary figure in the American art world (See here a report about Thelma Golden in 2018). “She is one of the most inventive curators in the United States. She has been able to reposition American art within a broader context,” says her former colleague Adam Weinberg, who was director of the Whitney Museum for 20 years.

She herself refuses to use the word “political” to describe the museum. And yet she states: “It is a museum devoted to art and culture that is informed by, you know, the power and possibility embedded in Black life.”

Barbara Chase-Riboud

Barbara Chase-Riboud

Two floors are devoted to presenting a selection –a kind of quick, slightly chaotic survey– from among the 9,000 works in the permanent collection. There is, for example, a sumptuous sculpture in metal and golden fibres representing Cleopatra’s immense cloak, by the French American artist Barbara Chase-Riboud (born 1939).Her work was shown in Harlem as early as 2017, before a major international wave of rediscovery. The same is true of Beauford Delaney (1901–1979), a figurative then abstract painter who was given particular prominence in the exhibition Paris Noir at the Centre Pompidou last spring,(See here the report about Paris Noir ) while he had already been exhibited at the Studio Museum as early as 2013.

Isaac Julien

David Hammons

At the museum entrance, and again inside in a tiny format, you find the “African American flag” conceived in 1997 by the highly mischievous David Hammons (born 1943), at once an heir to Marcel Duchamp and a defender of the Black cause ( See here and here reports about David Hammons). The flag combines the motifs of the American flag with the colours of the Pan-African movement: red, green and black. This star of the art market was already being championed by the museum in 2013.

Tom Lloyd

Powerful engine of discovery

This institution “made in Harlem” is a powerful engine of discovery. Consider the exceptional artist Tom Lloyd (1929–1996), to whom an entire room is now devoted. He was a pioneer in the use of neon and electronics in his installations, unveiled in 1968. Yet it has taken until 2025 for his work to be seen again.

Henry Taylor

While the museum world is trying to make up for lost time with regard to artists of African descent – as, for example, the Whitney Museum is currently revisiting the Surrealist spirit of the 1960s in a far more inclusive way, while the Guggenheim is showing the work of African American artist Rashid Johnson (See here an interview of Rashid Johnson – for Thelma Golden the struggle is not over: “I think there has been more opportunity for artists of color, throughout the world, but even with that, it still doesn’t, in no way captures what it means to think about the breadth and depth of work made by artists of African descent.”

www.studiomuseum.org/

Jean-Michel Basquiat

(1) Today the Breuer Building, on Madison Avenue, is the headquarters of Sotheby’s in the United States.