Looking Back at Black Male: A Conversation with Thelma Golden, Hilton Als, and Huey Copeland

In the fall of 1994, the Whitney Museum presented Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art, a groundbreaking exhibition curated by Thelma Golden. Conceived in dialogue with an extraordinary group of contemporary artists, Black Male investigated the complex aesthetics and politics at work in representations of African-American men in the post-Civil Rights era. On the twentieth anniversary of Black Male, Golden, Director and Chief Curator at the Studio Museum in Harlem, speaks about the exhibition and its afterlives in conversation with the writer Hilton Als, who edited the exhibition’s catalogue, and the art historian and critic Huey Copeland.