This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.

One morning recently, a Monday, instead of going downtown to the office, I went north to

Harlem, to a construction site.

You've spent a lot of time in a hard hat in the last seven years.

Hard hat, ugly boots, a vest in, you know...

Thelma Golden doesn't do ugly boots.

I was there to meet Thelma Golden, a curator and a major presence in New York's

cultural life. Golden is the director of the Studio Museum in Harlem. She's also the muscle and the

imagination behind the radically rebuilt and expanded museum, which has just reopened. Golden gave me

a tour of the place recently,

even as workers were putting on the finishing touches and installing paintings and sculpture.

It smells like a new car in here.

Well, it very much is like that.

I mean, can you imagine?

I mean, all of this, you know, got built.

Putting up a new museum is never really easy.

They have very specific requirements, and they often involve name architects, and they cost a ton of money.

The studio museum has been closed for seven years, while the old building was being demolished,

and a new one was created on the spot.

So we're in the lobby of the museum looking out onto 125th Street. So those who'd visited in the

past who came through our atrium were greeted by Glenn Ligons' amazing work call Us a Poem, a 2007 neon work,

...