Her latest curatorial coup—Africa Comics—opened on November 15 and will be on view through mid-March, 2007.

	Mendozza y Caramba AAAAA! c. 2002 Courtesy of the artist and Africa e Mediterraneo, Bologna

Don’t expect funny pages and superheroes. Instead, with a mix of humor and outrage, more than 30 artists from across the African continent portray politics, myth, history, and social awareness through this vital medium.

This is the first such exhibition in the U.S., a joint effort by Thelma and a non-profit cultural exchange group from Bologna, Italy called Africa e Mediterraneo. The works were chosen from among thousands she pored over.

Born in Queens some 40ish years ago, Thelma went to the progressive New Lincoln School on the Upper East Side and divided her free time between museum hopping and Bloomingdale’s shopping with her pal, Alexandra Llewellyn, now Tom Clancy’s wife. Clothes are still a passion. Ever chic, she fills the closets of her Park Slope penthouse with designs by Tracy Reese and Eric Gaskins, among others. She wore Patrick Robinson to the museum's annual gala at Cipriani Wall, the can’t-miss benefit for New York’s black elite that raised $1.6 million of the museum’s $6 million budget.

Thelma began her journey to the 60,000-square-foot Studio Museum on a job during winter break from Smith, where she majored in art history and African Studies—a powerful testament, parents, to the importance of internships! She made her indelible mark in the art world at age 27 when as the Whitney’s first black curator, she put together the controversial exhibition, Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary Art.

Thelma emphasizes that her focus now is contemporary black artists, not black art per se or work necessarily informed either by race or gender or “we are the world, Kumbaya,” as she so inimitably puts it in her rapid-fire way. She appears totally unfazed by that fact that she is one of the only black women in the predominantly white-male art establishment: “I never think of it that way. I‘ve worked in a world that is open to ideas I’m interested in with colleagues at amazing institutions.” Harvard’s Henry Louis Gates, Jr. could well be right when he predicts: “She will become the first black director of a major white institution.”

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