Since the Harlem Renaissance, Black women have shaped the culture uptown: In 1948, Jean Blackwell Hutson was appointed curator at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and in 1968, Dr. Barbara Ann Teer founded the National Black Theatre. Yet only now arethe majority of the neighborhood’s most prominent theaters and museums being simultaneously led by Black women — women who are fortifying and expanding their organizations in spite of funding cuts for libraries and arts programs and the rapid gentrification of their community.
Black culture is often recognized as important only in retrospect; consider the recent opening of “The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, an amendment to its famously disgraceful 1969 exhibition on the same subject. But further uptown, you’ll find a group of women in charge. Their institutions are flourishing, creating new infrastructure while growing their audiences, and this cohort is focused as much on preserving Black history as they are on building Harlem’s future. There’s Thelma Golden, director and chief curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem, who is leading the institution through a $210 million construction project slated to open in 2025 while the CEO of the National Black Theatre, Sade Lythcott, is seeing the theater through a dazzling 21-story renovation down the block. The Apollo’s CEO, Michelle Ebanks, and executive producer, Kamilah Forbes, just opened the Victoria Theater next door to its main stage, marking the historic venue’s first expansion in its storied history. Their progressive visions align with those of the Schomburg Center’s Joy Bivins, Harlem Stage’s Patricia Cruz, Dance Theatre of Harlem’s Anna Glass, and the National Jazz Museum’s Tracy Hyter-Suffern.
From the wisdom passed on to them by their predecessors, these women represent a powerful commitment to community development. “We have to determine — by listening to the community, by listening to the world around us — what is a story that we need to tell through the facility of this institution,” Forbes says of revitalizing the Apollo. “We have to constantly be ready to evolve.” To crown Harlem’s reigning tastemakers, we dressed them in this season’s most elegant clothes. “This is a neighborhood,” says Golden, “that never fails to feel alive.”
Thelma Golden
Director and chief curator since 2005
Championing artists such as Glenn Ligon, Lorna Simpson, Sanford Biggers, and Noah Davis (whose The Gardener is pictured), Golden went from a Studio Museum intern in 1985 to the curator elevating historically overlooked Black artists into the blue-chip art market. Lately, she has presided over the $210 million construction of the museum’s new home on 125th Street, which will house galleries, artists’ studios, and community gathering spaces. The building’s design pays homage to the architecture in the neighborhood, including an “inverted stoop” similar to the ones you might see in front of a Harlem brownstone. “As cultural leaders, we have built institutions not in the physical structures, but in intellectual, emotional, and dare I say spiritual structures for years,” Golden says. With the National Black Theatre and the Apollo undergoing parallel expansions, and her former Studio Museum colleague Patricia Cruz at the helm of the Harlem Stage, she says, “It’s a historic moment. But it’s also about future-making. It’s about creating and sustaining institutions that will continue to be a part of Harlem as Harlem changes and evolves.”
Kamilah Forbes
Executive producer since 2016
Michelle Ebanks
President and CEO since 2023
“When I think about Harlem, I think about women like Ruby Dee, Abbey Lincoln, and Maya Angelou,” says Forbes. “These women organized on the streets and met in parlors along Lenox Avenue.” She sees the Apollo Theater, which last year acquired and renovated the neighboring Victoria Theater, as another kind of parlor. “As Harlem gentrifies, it is now our responsibility to formalize the kind of gatherings that were held by them right here in our community,” she adds. Rooted in this legacy, she builds upon her background as an artistic director to work alongside Ebanks as the theater’s creative visionary.
Ebanks is the newest leader on the block, guiding the theater’s first major expansion in its 90-year history. “I’m six months in, I’m still pinching myself,” she says. She works closely with Forbes and other cultural leaders in the neighborhood to “shift the balance of the cultural focus within New York City toward Harlem,” she adds. It’s about being part of a sisterhood that can form an “ecosystem” of institutions that support and celebrate one another. “When the Studio Museum is stronger, the Apollo Theater is stronger. We give to each other, and we all get more in return.”
Anna Glass
Executive director since 2016
When the Dance Theatre of Harlem was founded in 1969, it was the first classical ballet company with predominantly Black dancers. Today, Glass has pushed the mission further by incorporating what she calls “unexpected” music into a classical, “white” art form, remixing it for a diverse and multigenerational crowd. “You will see classical ballet sometimes set to music by James Brown or Aretha Franklin, and it is still classical ballet,” she says. “When we think about dance and specifically ballet, we are really making a statement about the ways in which Black people exist in this country.”
Tracy Hyter-Suffern
Executive director since 2017
Working alongside musicians Jon Batiste and Christian McBride as artistic directors, Hyter-Suffern is intent on introducing jazz to younger audiences. Her programming focus has been on the Museum’s New Artists in Residence series, which invites visual artists to exhibit their work throughout the museum, and on introductory jazz workshops for K-12 students. “We have brought in over 24,000 students, most of them from Title I schools. A lot of those kids are in Harlem for the very first time in their lives,” she says. “The music is a living, breathing organism that evolves with culture. Jazz in Harlem is an experience. It has been the inspiration for political and social movements and, in so many ways, the music is the message.”
Patricia Cruz
CEO and artistic directorsince 1998
Cruz has been a major figure in Harlem for years — she held a senior position at the Studio Museum before moving to the Harlem Stage. Now, she’s sustaining the next generation of talent. “Artists can see and translate experiences such that we can better understand ourselves,” she says. Cruz runs the theater’s WaterWorks program, which commissions established and emerging artists of color, providing long-term funding to help them “realize their own visions,” says Cruz. “Frequently, Black artists have not been given the kind of support that one would get from a Harvey Lichtenstein at BAM, where you would get hundreds of thousands of dollars to develop your work.”
Joy Bivins
Director since 2021
Bivins is only the second woman to lead the Schomburg, which has served as one of the world’s leading research libraries and archival repositories for Black history since 1925. From the preservation of the Malcolm X archive to honoring the impact of playwright Lorraine Hansberry by providing free public access to her writings and recordings, Bivins has continued to expand the work of the Schomburg while looking to the future — including the center’s (and Malcolm X’s) 100th birthday next year. “We’ve been working for a century in developing this discipline of Black studies, which gives people a really critical way to think about not just the nation’s history but world history,” she says.
Sade Lythcott
CEO since 2008
Lythcott’s mother, Dr. Barbara Ann Teer, founded the National Black Theatre in 1968 “as a subversive experiment in the healing of Black communities,” Lythcott says. Continuing her mother’s legacy, Lythcott feels that “if we can channel, call on, and honor this ancestral energy, then we can not only produce incredible art and culture, but we can also change the face of our communities.” Today, she leads the theater through a monumental renovation that began in 2022. It will now house the Great Ancestor Hall and the 250-seat Temple of Liberation, one of two immersive performance venues. “I’m building toward succession,” Lythcott says. “We can give back to our people what was stolen from us.”
By Najha Zigbi-Johnson , 2024-03-27 13:00:33
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