Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary Art
According to Golden, the impetus for the exhibition was the goal of creating a new model for understanding the complex aesthetics and politics at work in representations of African American men in the post-Civil Rights era. In her time as a curator at the Whitney Museum, Golden was struck by institutional attitudes and exhibition making that excluded—or only very narrowly included—the work of black artists. The curator described feeling as if "a new language had to be invented" in order to interrogate the idea of cultural specificity in the museum, especially in relation to blackness. One of the central guiding questions for the exhibition, according to Golden, was "what would happen if I made an exhibition that completely lived in a world of Black—with a big B—art and artists: uncompromised, unapologetic, uninterested in the mainstream art world?" She drew from Lowery Stokes Sims' idea of “curatorial archaeology” --- curatorial representation of artists historically excluded from mainstream art exhibitions --- to establish a precedent for thinking about black artists and their work through a conceptual lens, and offer a path to canon revision.