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This month in Artforum:
Street, Stoop, Stage, Sanctuary: A Studio Museum Roundtable
As museums around the world reflect on their role in the reproduction of structures of domination, one instructive example is New York’s Studio Museum in Harlem, a modest but pivotal institution created in 1968 to champion Black culture and center artists of African descent. To help delineate the museum’s history and significance, Artforum organized an intergenerational conversation of Studio Museum leaders and alums—Naomi Beckwith, Thelma Golden, Thomas (T.) Jean Lax, and Lowery Stokes Sims—moderated by David Velasco, the magazine’s editor in chief.
“What I hope, and I say this to many of the young people on the front lines, is that some of them will start another museum right now.”
—Thelma Golden
“Being the guardians of Black culture does not mean we’re the gatekeepers.”
—Lowery Stokes Sims
Impermanent Collections: Julia Bryan-Wilson on Queer and Trans Artists’ Museums
“In a moment ringing with calls to reevaluate the entire premise of museums, or to abandon them altogether, it is worth noting how many queer and trans artists have in the past few decades proposed new kinds of institutions.”
—Julia Bryan-Wilson
Maximum Impact: Kaelen Wilson-Goldie on the art of Ouattara Watts
“What the artist provides are tools. His maximalism is therefore the mark of his generosity.”
—Kaelen Wilson-Goldie
Ciarán Finlayson on “Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America”
“During the convulsive interlude between the show’s conception and its opening, the valence of the terms grief and grievance changed.”
—Ciarán Finlayson
And: Fall museum shows, Christine Mehring on the Panza Collection Initiative, Daniel Birnbaum on Hilma af Klint’s institutional imagination, Yuki Higashino on Yuji Agematsu’s zip: 01.01.2020 … 12.31.2020, Travis Jeppesen on Shuang Li, Paul Galvez on “Cézanne Drawing,” and more than thirty-five exhibition reviews from around the globe.
Plus: David Salle on Janet Malcolm, Ara Osterweil on Daïchi Saïto’s earthearthearth, Kate Sutton on Protocinema’s “A Few In Many Places,” Jay Sanders on the Canal Street Research Association, Adam Jasper on Olafur Eliasson at the Fondation Beyeler, and Moses Sumney shares his Top Ten.
