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 are the majority of the neighborhood’s most prominent theaters and museums being simultaneously led by Black women — women who are fortifying and expanding their organizations despite 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.
-Thelma Golden, director and chief curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem, leads the institution through a $300 million construction project slated to open in 2025.
- Sade Lythcott, CEO of the National Black Theatre, is seeing the theater through a dazzling 21-story renovation down the block.
- Michelle Ebanks, Apollo’s CEO, 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.
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.”
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