It is a celebration as well as a reckoning.

The Studio Museum in Harlem reopened this fall after seven years in a new building that showcases its history of highlighting black artists.

A history and project credited with helping change and diversify the art world.

Senior arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown visited the museum for our arts and culture series, Canvas.

Today, Thelma Golden is a widely respected and much-loved figure in the art world.

But everyone has to start somewhere, and as it happens, an important somewhere for her was as a young intern at the very place she's now led for 20 years, the Studio Museum in Harlem.

This museum opened up a whole world for me, because here was this museum that was founded so

specifically to steward the work of black artists. And what I encountered here as a young person was a group of people

who were so passionately committed with so much purpose and that we're doing it in ways

that, you know, didn't ever occur to me were possible.

All these years later, Golden is presiding over the reopening of the museum in a stunning

new $160 million building that somehow fits into its former site on 125th Street

in the heart of Harlem, an historic center of Black American life and culture.

Seven floors doubling its former exhibition space, offering multiple pathways, in a design

by Ajay Associates, a large lobby with a neon Miwi by artist Glenn Lygon.

A roof garden with stunning views out over Manhattan skylines, water towers and church steeples included.

But the underlying story remains how the studio from its founding in 1968 helped change

what's seen on museum and gallery walls around the world.

The studio museum was necessary because the contributions of artists of African descent

were not being adequately acknowledged.

Works were not being collected or shown in institution.

Art histories were often excluding some of the major voices.

...