ART : As Defiant as Always : Thelma Golden, curator of the L.A.-bound ‘Black Male,’ has been caught in a firestorm of criticism and protest. It’s OK; she can stand the heat.

When Thelma Golden decided she wanted to be a curator of contemporary art in a major Manhattan museum, she never expected to send everyone home happy. “The day I decided I didn’t want to be a 19th-Century European curator, I knew I would never have the experience of people coming and going ‘ooh’ and ‘aah,’ the way they do around the Monets,” she says. “It just doesn’t happen .”

Golden may always have expected controversy. But she never expected the last five months or so to unfold quite the way they have.

At 29, as the curator of “Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art,” an exhibition that opened at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art in November and opens Tuesday at the UCLA Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center, Golden has been buried in an avalanche of sensational criticism and protest.

Though New York magazine, among others, liked the exhibition (it “courageously subverts the stereotype of what black art should be like”) and the New York Times said the show wasn’t provocative enough (“predictable inside-the-art-world-Beltway stuff”), Golden’s critics have been loud and visible.

While she calls her show an exhibition exploring the “changing perceptions of African American masculinity as interpreted in painting, photography and mixed-media work during the past 30 years,” her detractors in New York and in Los Angeles (some of whom hadn’t even seen the show before they spoke up) have called it “degrading,” “demeaning,” “stereotypical,” “pornographic” and “dangerous.”

They have protested the exhibition’s inclusion of images of crime, poverty, homelessness and homosexual themes. They have charged that Golden didn’t include enough African American artists in her survey. They have weighed in on the sociological significance of a young black woman presenting images of black men created by artists of all colors, genders and sexual orientations.

“(“Black Male”) doesn’t have any redeeming qualities,” says Miriam Fergerson, who with her husband, artist Cecil Fergerson, is heading a “response” show in Los Angeles titled “African American Representations of Masculinity.” “We wanted to reframe and project the images that reflect the depth, the courage and strength of the black male.” (The Fergersons’ project, running concurrently with “Black Male,” will be exhibited variously at the William Grant Still Community Arts Center, the Museum of African American Art and Watts Towers Arts Center.)

Even the Hammer Museum, while standing behind the integrity of the show, has felt it necessary to create a series of educational forums surrounding the exhibition to dispel the possibility of misunderstandings.

Sitting in the cafe at SoHo’s Exit Art alternative art space, where she is on the board of directors, Golden is clearly weary of explaining her show and herself.

“I have said this about 4 million times,” she says. “This show is not about representation. This is not a documentary survey on black men as they live and breathe today, it is not a catalogue of types. It is about the way in which contemporary artists have looked at black masculinity, especially how it has been portrayed in popular culture.

“My role in it was to talk about how truly obsessed America is with race, if we really get down to it. And if we get down to it, it is not really race, it is black masculinity --that’s what it is. They are synonyms, in a weird way.

“I guess I was naive to believe that in 1995, as a black cultural producer, that I could exist in a world where I could do these things,” she says with a sigh. “You know, we could have arguments about them, but it wouldn’t certainly get to this .”

‘One of the greatest inventions of the 20th Century is the African American male,” writes Golden in the introduction to the “Black Male” (pun intended) exhibition catalogue, “ ‘invented’ because black masculinity represents an amalgam of fears and projections in the American psyche which rarely conveys or contains the trope of truth about the black male’s existence.”

Golden’s show, in part, makes tangible those “fears and projections.” At the Whitney, visitors to “Black Male” were met by headless black mannequins dressed as museum guards (Fred Wilson’s “Guarded View”). Gary Simmons’ “Lineup” presents pairs of gold-plated athletic shoes posed in a police lineup (Golden notes that the strongest media images of black men involve crime and sports). Robert Colescott’s painting “George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware: Page From American History” depicts the subject in a Napoleonic pose surrounded by stereotypical characters including Aunt Jemima and the Cream of Wheat man.

In all, Golden chose about 70 works by 29 visual artists. Photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe present studies of nude black men, and some Lyle Ashton Harris photos present men in drag. Jean-Michel Basquiat is represented, as are David Hammons, Dawn DeDeaux, Leon Golub, Glenn Ligon, Adrian Piper, Andres Serrano, Carrie Mae Weems and Pat Ward Williams. The New York exhibition had a film component, including Gordon Parks’ “The Learning Tree” and “Shaft,” Parks’ and Melvin Van Peebles’ “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song” and Marlon Riggs’ film on black homosexuals, “Tongues Untied.” The Hammer plans a smaller film component, to be held at the Melnitz Theater on the UCLA campus.

One of Golden’s mentors, Lowery Sims, 46, associate curator of 20th-Century art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for 23 years and the museum’s first black curator, says she sees the backlash against some of these artists and works as a generational thing. “Older people, the 40-pluses, were desirous of an exhibition of positive images, while younger people understand exactly what is going on,” she says. “It’s interesting the way a younger generation of black males will, in a very defiant way, cop to their own images in the media, and throw it back at the world.”

D efiant is the right word for Golden as well. Dressed today in black stretch bell-bottoms and a cropped lime green mohair jacket, the Smith College art history graduate shaved her head and bared her navel for a Whitney VIP party in November (her hair has since grown to a short crop) and maintains a commitment to the unconventional. That mandate, Golden says somewhat heatedly, is her reason for not fashioning “Black Male” as a collection of comforting “positive role model” images.

Golden also wanted to steer away from two museum traditions: (a) presenting a collection of works by members of an ethnic group for no other reason than that they are members of that group and (b) doing an exhibition on a particular subject that includes the work of one token artist of a given race who is then supposed to represent all artists--and all people--of the race.

“I was interested in inclusion, and wanted to break from the habit of doing surveys based on race,” Golden said. “That used to be very important, to make people understand that Asian people and Hispanic people and black people and women made art. I’m not going to say that we are beyond that necessity . . . but it’s been done.”

Golden--whose rapid-fire speech pattern reflects her desire for speedy social progress--seems impatient, maybe even a little hurt, that the world refuses to keep up with her. “Sometimes I wonder just what show they are seeing, because I sort of walk in and I am struck by the sheer beauty of the work.”

Not that Golden minds people disliking her exhibition--she just wishes the seemingly nonstop chatter about it would rise above the “good/bad” level. She calls detractors who deny her right to present “negative images” the “authenticity police,” and charges that they speak with the same voice as government officials who would have “offensive” art outlawed.

“I’m so finished with that, the positive/negative thing? I’m done with that,” she exclaims. “I can’t even go there anymore. I can’t even remember what I used to say about that. It does boil down to that, but that’s what I mean about the simplistic level of the dialogue, it’s a simple way to talk about things. But this work is much more complicated than that.

“Work that is branded homoerotic in content is branded negative, and implicit in that statement is that that is wrong --so therefore the work is negative,” Golden continues. “You can’t even talk about an entry into a certain feminist dialogue, because feminism is wrong!”

Adds Golden: “The black people are the ones who are doing it, which is what really flips me out--they can’t get with the Mapplethorpe because he’s gay, but I’m like, these are some of the most beautiful photographs of black men ever taken, who cares?”

And, despite her claim that she will not talk anymore about her critics’ obsession with positive images, she does talk about it. “I work for a very large museum, I could very easily be the ‘no comment queen’ . . . but I’m down for discussing it, because there is something about that I would like to understand a little better,” Golden says. “I hope that what falls out of this is a group of people that, yes, don’t like the show but want to go further.”

She believes that the simplistic approach to the exhibition has been much more characteristic of Los Angeles than New York. “The really provincial nature of the culturally based, community-based arts community in L.A. is problematic for me,” she says.

Her first encounter with that community was none too pleasant. On Dec. 12, a cocktail reception to introduce the exhibition to Los Angeles was held at the Santa Monica home of computer tycoon Peter Norton and his wife, Eileen, avid contemporary art patrons who are new members of the Whitney Board of Trustees. The Nortons underwrote $50,000 in costs for the Whitney exhibition and are also financial backers for the Hammer exhibition.

It appears that Golden quickly became the guest of dishonor. While host Peter Norton says eventually at least one person stood up to defend Golden, a number of attendees were not shy in expressing their dismay about the “Black Male” images, which were presented in a slide show that night. Cecil Fergerson, who later went on to organize the response show, expressed dismay that guests were laughing at Colescott’s George Washington Carver piece. (“Yeah,” says the frustrated Golden, “ when you show that, people laugh--Bob (Colescott) wants that. His work is all about humor and satire.”)

According to Norton, Golden was visibly deflated by the attacks, and in response, she fired back, telling the L.A. Weekly in January that her Los Angeles critics represent a “retro, very ‘70s Afrocentric culture.” She also charges that some of her critics are homophobic and misogynistic.

Norton clearly does not agree with Golden’s detractors, but he doesn’t think the negative reaction in Los Angeles has been any stronger than in New York: “In fact there was more in New York than I am aware of here,” he said. “(But) she was overly concerned; I think she got the same negativity in New York, it’s just that she was more comfortable on her own turf.

“There is a small degree of truth that New York is a more intellectual town, and the intellectuals are more visible there,” Norton continues. “It’s not like we are all walking around here scratching our armpits, there are just as many intellectual people in L.A., but there is not an intellectual community --I think that’s the difference. But the whole other business, about what are these images and why are they not the images we want them to be and that kind of crap--I mean, she got the same stuff in New York.”

And he says bluntly, “Although I am a big fan of Thelma’s, my take is . . . to be highly critical of what she has said. I think she is being real dumb in that every city is different, and I think she is being a little inexperienced, a little immature, in not expecting the lay of the land here to be different.”

It may or may not be evidence of Los Angeles’ reluctance to accept this exhibition that, in early 1995, downtown’s Museum of Contemporary Art declined an invitation from the Whitney to show “Black Male.” Norton was then on MOCA’s board of directors. He subsequently left the MOCA board. Norton now declines comment on MOCA’s decision, but he has said it did not cause him to leave the board. According to a MOCA statement: “As with all exhibitions that are offered to MOCA, it was reviewed and discussed at length by the curatorial staff, and following this review process, the decision was made to decline the exhibition. The museum is pleased that city (sic) will have the opportunity to see the exhibition at the Armand Hammer Museum, thanks to the leadership of (Hammer director) Henry Hopkins and Peter Norton.”

Golden, who lives in Brooklyn, grew up in Queens, where her father owns an insurance brokerage, and attended private schools in New York, where she says she gained wide exposure to the performing and visual arts. And as soon as she was able to have career aspirations, she wanted to be a curator. “I think I, in going to museums as a young child, really realized that someone did that--I didn’t have a name for it, but it was clear that somebody put those things up, somewhere,” she says. “As soon as it became clear to me what that job was, that was the job I wanted.”

What hurts about the type of criticism surrounding “Black Male,” she says, is the fact that critical members of Los Angeles black arts’ scene fail to understand that, when it comes to advancing integration in the art world, she is completely on their side--and wishes artists would have the courage to face their real opponents.

“Now, MOCA and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art have been sitting over there all this time, and I am amazed that there have been any number of shows--which I could name, but I won’t--that are not including anybody of color, and in some cases not even a gender other than male,” Golden says. “But somehow . . . that never seemed to galvanize anybody (in Los Angeles) who are now so much these keepers of black cultural life-- that didn’t seem to galvanize anybody into action.

“I have to wonder, what makes it appropriate and interesting now? They are not willing to go down to California Plaza (the location of MOCA) and have a protest, but they are willing to do it to me. . . . Would people be as eager and willing to take on the white boys? I doubt it.

“If they had wanted to go march on California Plaza, I would have been the first one there. . . . I do that in New York, I am the first one who is willing consistently to admit things need to change. I just cannot do it with this sort of antagonistic stance. . . . I want to stress strategy, not protest. The will and the desire and the passion are all there, but just no political savvy, at least, no ‘90s political savvy. I think that whole wave -your -fist -in -the -air -and -yell -and -scream does nothing but create noise at this point.

“(The mainstream museum world) to me is truly one of the last bastions; this is a world where you can go into museums and institutions that are really, totally, all white. Except maybe the guards, which is what the Fred Wilson piece (“Guarded View”) is about in my show.

“Until we attack that sort of institutional root structure, things aren’t going to change. It’s fine and good to talk about why we do or don’t like the show, but let’s talk about the lack of representation in a large-scale way, of African Americans in museums in L.A.--which is the same situation, by and large, as New York.”

* “Black Male” will be on view Tuesday-June 18 at the UCLA Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center, 10899 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles. Admission $4.50, $3 for seniors, $1 for students with ID. Hours: Tuesday-Saturday, 11 a.m.-7 p.m. (Thursday until 9 p.m.); Sunday, 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Closed Mondays. Information: (310) 443-7000.