Rewriting Art History at the Studio Museum in Harlem

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. One morning recently, a Monday, Instead of going downtown to the office, I went north to Harlem, to a construction site.

You've spent a lot of time in a hard hat in the last seven years. Hard hat, ugly boots, a vest in, you know Thelma Golden doesn't do ugly boots. I was there to meet Thelma Golden, a curator and a major presence in New York's cultural life. Golden is the director of the studio museum in Harlem. She's also the muscle and the imagination behind the radically rebuilt and expanded.

expanded museum which has just reopened. Golden gave me a tour of the place recently, even as workers were putting on the finishing touches and installing paintings and sculpture. It smells like a new car in here. Well it very much is like that. I mean can you imagine?

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript (18 minutes, 2,722 words), segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.

No account needed, we create one from your checkout email. With credits it is 1 credit; packs start at 10 episodes for $5, and monthly plans are cheaper still.