This fall, two New York City museums that have helped shape contemporary culture are finally reopening to the public. One is the New Museum, the pioneering non-collecting institution on Bowery, which closed last year to build an expansion, designed by OMA/Shohei Shigematsu and Rem Koolhaas, that will nearly double its exhibition space.
The other is the Studio Museum in Harlem, the influential center for work by Black and African diaspora artists, which is opening a long-awaited new home on 125th Street, designed by Adjaye Associates in collaboration with Cooper Robertson, after closing its old building for demolition in 2018.
While both museums have stayed active through off-site and virtual programs, the opening of their new spaces will return New York’s museum landscape to its welcome density.
The Studio Museum, founded in 1968, and the New Museum, born in 1977, have expanded the scope and audiences for contemporary art for decades, in the process evolving from alternative roots that challenged the hierarchy to power players in their own right.
For Lisa Phillips, director of the New Museum since 1999, and Thelma Golden, director and chief curator of the Studio Museum since 2005, the connections are personal too. The two are good friends — they talk several times a week — and have shared experiences as female leaders whose influence in the museum field is felt not only in exhibitions and programs, but also through the many curators and other professionals who came through their institutions early in their careers.
Tempering the excitement, however, is the current fraught atmosphere for cultural organizations. This new reality has brought — so far — deep cuts in staffing and grantmaking by the National Endowment for the Humanities, efforts to dismantle the Institute of Museum and Library Services, and ultimatums by President Trump to end diversity programs and remove what he describes as “corrosive” and “anti-American” ideology from the Smithsonian Institution. Recently, the incoming director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, described the overall climate around museums under the Trump administration as “volatile.”
When we met in early March in downtown Manhattan, Phillips and Golden were guarded in addressing the current atmosphere, but they said they were drawing on historical lessons to reinforce their sense of mission.
This conversation, reflecting a joint interview and follow-up questions by telephone, has been edited for length and clarity.
How do you plan to reintroduce your museums to New Yorkers and visitors?
LISA PHILLIPS With the doubling of our space, we have an opportunity to do broader outreach than we’ve ever done. We’re mobilizing our whole staff to go into the neighborhood and have personal interactions with both our partners and beyond. There are so many organizations around us. Shopkeepers, residents in NYCHA housing, we have an opportunity to go out and to invite people in. And there is going to be so much to experience in the architecture, in addition to the art program.
THELMA GOLDEN I know that both the designs of our institutions took in a thoughtful approach to create deeper experiences, not just for artists but for audiences. We’ll be welcoming people who had never come to the Studio Museum, to have this be the occasion to invite them to the museum and to Harlem.
Thelma, in these seven years, a huge amount has happened that connects to the museum’s core mission of presenting the work of artists of African descent — from the Black Lives Matter upsurge in 2020 to the surging market and its impact on artists. Was it frustrating to not be open during that time?
GOLDEN Absolutely. Frustrating because we were made for this moment, our history in some ways ushered in this moment. But there was something profound in being able to witness it as we were working to build this next life for this institution. The energy around artists of African descent lives as proof of concept to what our founders imagined when they took a little loft on 125th Street and Fifth Avenue. They were imagining a future for Black artists in the world that at that time did not exist, but they knew that they could see it and they could work to make it happen.
PHILLIPS There was also a tremendous acknowledgment in the field of the history and legacy of the Studio Museum and its impact on all of us during this time. So in a way, it was constantly alive.
Are there lessons from the last few years that you each carry into programs as you reopen?
PHILLIPS It’s been a period of profound disruptions — not just the last year and a half, but the last decade. The pandemic made us think about our programs differently, because we had to be remote, find ways to engage our audience outside of the norm. We realized that virtual platforms are as important as bricks and mortar. I know we believe similarly in that.
GOLDEN This building project has meant rooting deeply in legacy — to project into the next idea of what we will be as a museum. For our founders the canon could not be complete without the voices and visions of Black artists, so they were going to reimagine and open that canon. They were trying to think of a museum as studio, this museum in Harlem as a new type. That’s what we can be doing in this moment — imagining a new form of museum as we make a future.
How does this opportunity change the Studio Museum’s approach to collecting? Can you collect more works in a wide variety of mediums and forms?
GOLDEN Yes, it means we can collect more. How we collect, why we collect, is an ongoing question. I am not a big fan of trying to predict too far into the future on these questions. I think some of this is responsive to real time. Each successive generation can make decisions that make sense for the institution in that time. All the forms are on the table in a way that represents the breadth and depth of art being made by artists of African descent today. While our acquisitions budget is expected to increase, our primary source of new works will continue to be gifts and bequests to the museum.
Lisa, the New Museum is non-collecting. How do you challenge and grow the canon?
PHILLIPS [The first director] Marcia Tucker said, “I had to found a museum in order to work in one,” because her interests were so outside of the norm that it was impossible to work in a traditional institution. Our name is paradoxical: New Museum. We always have this tension. We always have to push ourselves to go beyond the canon. There are always going to be artists who are underrecognized and not part of the mainstream dialogue. We don’t collect, as you noted. We see ourselves as producers, working collaboratively with artists, helping artists realize their visions.
How will you balance admission fees with growing the audience? The emerging norm in U.S. museums is pushing $30.
PHILLIPS We won’t be $30. We get a significant amount of our income from admissions, but we understand that it’s a barrier to access. Our pay-what-you-wish Thursday evenings are very popular; we always have discounts for seniors and students, and entry is free to those under 18. We are also exploring the possibility of a community membership for those in our ZIP code. Our hope is that, with our encouragement, funders will underwrite expanded free access.
GOLDEN We need a cultural shift that values what it means to make the experiences in museums accessible, so that underwriting wouldn’t seem such a hard thing to make happen universally. The reason I work in museums is because I grew up in the city in a moment when almost all the museums had free admission for high school students — which they do again now. But for our institutions to live, admission becomes a form of income that we need.
You said a cultural shift. Where would that come from?
GOLDEN It would come from the idea that these museum experiences would exist like libraries, parks, and should be open to all.
PHILLIPS When we were open during the pandemic, we saw the great value that the public put on museums right away. It was one of the safest places for people to convene. We had public officials calling us, begging us to reopen.
According to city data for 2024, New York attracts nearly 65 million visitors per year. Do enough of them go to museums?
culturPHILLIPS Tourism is important. Fifty percent of our audience are people visiting the city. We have an international program so we are attracting audiences from all over the world, which is great. But we also have a very strong local audience too, from the ZIP codes around the museum, and Brooklyn.
GOLDEN For us it’s probably 30 percent tourists. Quite often visitors come to Harlem to have cultural and art experiences, and we are able to program in response to that. Providing many different kinds of experiences, of not just our mission but of the neighborhood’s culture and history.
You’ve each announced your reopening exhibitions — a museum-wide exhibition “New Humans: Memories of the Future” at the New Museum, and an exhibition of Tom Lloyd, an artist and activist who had the very first show at the Studio Museum’s original loft space in 1968. What else is coming up?
PHILLIPS One way to stay new is to look at the new and the old. That’s not something that’s expected of our institution. “New Humans” will look at over a century of art that deals with the relationship between humans and technology. The subtitle, “Memories of the Future,” suggests that progress is never a straight line. I’m also doing an exhibition on 400 years of Bowery history, coming up. And supporting artists who are creating new works. You’re going to see a lot more new pieces made on site. We will have a dedicated studio residency program. And we’ll have our 100 New Inc members on site again.
GOLDEN We will continue a program that thinks deeply about artists of African descent, and ideas, including thematic group shows. We will continue creating exhibitions that look at artists early in their career. Our artist residency program has been in existence since our founding. And we’ll continue survey exhibitions of individual artists. But we are also thinking about how the building itself creates new opportunities to commission site-specific works, to work on our roof, the building facade. We expect to announce new exhibitions and programs closer to reopening.
Lisa, there was turbulence on the labor front in 2019 when employees at the New Museum unionized. How would you characterize relations with labor now? How are you hoping to take care of your people in the years ahead, with a lot of economic uncertainty?
PHILLIPS I think we have a good relationship with the union now. That process, as painful as it was, also made us — and me — realize some things that we maybe hadn’t understood. The immense need for a director of human resources, for instance. We didn’t have a long enough family leave. We extended that. We’ve kept all our full-time and part-time staff employed through our closure. Which was a heavy lift, but worth it to give everyone that security.
The pressure on the arts now affects federal agencies and institutions first, like the Kennedy Center, the Smithsonian or the N.E.H., but it trickles through the system. As museum directors, how do you see the landscape? Is there a state of emergency?
PHILLIPS It hasn’t changed our mission or our values. And it’s made it even more important to do the work that we do. We’re paying attention. We have a strong network of colleagues, and we need to be in constant conversation. We also need to learn how to be platforms for conversation that may involve ideas that are at odds with our personal beliefs. This is a skill set that leaders have to have in every institution.
GOLDEN I’ve been trying to learn a lot from history. The Studio Museum was born in a moment like this. So I have been trying to lead with the wisdom that comes from those who have had to create a sense of a future in an awful time before. This is also a moment which continues to create real clarity about our missions. We need to be the space that allows for artists in this moment to make their work, present their work, be in conversation with each other and audiences. And it makes it clear that we want spaces that allow for conversations about truth and democracy, that are invested in complex narratives and give form to our ability to narrate how we all see the world through our eyes: Individual stories, collective stories, our ability to recognize what is the humanity in each other. All of that can come through our experience in encountering art. So it feels like a moment where what we do is incredibly necessary.
PHILLIPS Progress isn’t a straight line. We’re in new territory. But that is also our challenge. By exposing people to new experiences and forms of art making, we’re opening minds. And that really fosters tolerance for difference, for change.
What share of your budget comes from federal sources? Are you analyzing your exposure to changes in federal funding?
PHILLIPS Less than 1 percent of our annual budget comes from federal grants. But all contributions are significant for a nonprofit institution; we’ve learned that building as many different income streams as possible is essential to weathering disruptions that have become the norm in our world. During the pandemic we lost all of our earned income, for instance. It’s important to make sure that you’re not overly dependent on any one source because there can be disruptions in any number of directions. It’s also an evolutionary moment. We have to keep imagining what the future could be.
GOLDEN Likewise, less than 1 percent of our funding is covered by federal grants. All our income sources play a critical role in ensuring the Studio Museum remains accessible to all audiences.
Among changes in the field, there are many more women leaders in museums, for instance, where each of you was in some sense a pioneer.
GOLDEN But we still exist within a field that is not equitable, in many ways.
PHILLIPS A number of us have supported each other. We were lucky to have mentors who …
GOLDEN … who were pioneers in this field. Not only those who founded and ran our institutions but across this field there were women who really created a path.
PHILLIPS We feel deeply the importance of doing that for others. Incubating talent and the next generation of leadership is our most important job.
Siddhartha Mitter writes about art and creative communities in the United States, Africa and elsewhere. Previously he wrote regularly for The Village Voice and The Boston Globe and he was a reporter for WNYC Public Radio.
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