Black Romantic: Studio Museum in Harlem. (New York).

Curator Thelma Golden has taken risks in her career, most visibly with her 1994 "Black Male" exhibition at the Whitney, criticized by many for its propagation of "negative" images of African Americans. With "Black Romantic," she's going out on a different kind of limb. The show presents figurative painting and sculpture by little-known African American artists--little-known, at least, to most contemporary-art audiences. Widely collected by African Americans, the works, selected from an open call for submissions, are populist, celebratory, even nostalgic narratives whose MO is to counter mainstream (white) media-generated imagery. Golden's "conceptual exercise" has much to do with the museum itself, opening it, she says, to the "black world." Apr. 24-June 24.