When the Studio Museum in Harlem opened, in 1986, it occupied a rented loft. Last month, it reopened, after a seven-year hiatus—this time, in a handsome structure of dark concrete and glass, built specifically for the purposes of housing art. Thelma Golden, the museum’s director, told us recently that preparations for that reopening have led her to dwell even more than usual on “the space and the place” in which the museum sits—that is, a Harlem that is both a physical location and an imaginary world that has inspired generations of Black artists. Not long ago, she joined us to discuss a few of the texts that have shaped her thinking about this special neighborhood. Her remarks have been edited and condensed.
The Street
by Ann Petry
This is the story of a young black mother, Lutie Johnson, who lives in Harlem in the nineteen-forties. It’s both a novel and an incredibly significant sociological study, because it puts struggle and survival right up against possibility. Petry writes such luminous, beautiful prose, but that beauty exists alongside harsh realities.
This novel was very important to me as a young person, because my father was born in Harlem in 1926, and was raised there, and so the world that this novel describes is the world that he knew. It really brought me to a new level of understanding of him and his life. That was especially true because of how the novel centers the lives of women. My grandmother raised my father on her own in Harlem, and “The Street” helped me to understand her.
Another Country
by James Baldwin
For many, “Go Tell It on the Mountain,” Baldwin’s semi-autobiographical novel about the young stepson of a Pentecostal preacher, is Baldwin’s classic Harlem novel. But, for me, it’s this.
“Another Country,” which was published in 1962, tells the story of a group of young, artistic, politically engaged people who move among Greenwich Village, Harlem, and France. It has a love story embedded in it, but it’s also a novel that teems with the ideas of the moment. It speaks to the ways in which places form us. A lot of what we understand about one of the characters, Rufus, is defined by Harlem—not just as a geographic place but also as a symbol for Black life writ large. The book has really helped me to think about Harlem itself as a character, and as a way to animate ideas of modernity and Blackness.
Jazz
by Toni Morrison
As someone whose life has been changed in every way by Morrison’s work, it’s hard to say what my favorite book of hers is. They all live in me. But in the twenty-five years that I have been at the Studio Museum, and living and working in Harlem, “Jazz,” her 1992 novel, has had a special place in my pantheon because of its absolutely gorgeous portrait of this place.
It’s set in the nineteen-twenties, and it’s called “Jazz,” so right away we have a sense of its context. The story follows a love triangle, but it evokes the place and time with incredible richness. It’s the Harlem of the meeting of many Black worlds, the Harlem of music and culture and politics, of barber shops and beauty parlors. And all of that, of course, is conveyed through the utter poetry of Morrison’s prose.
