The music, by a band called Hudson Horns, was so loud that it drowned conversation. You mouthed a greeting and pretended to hear the answer, or, better, you got up and danced with the person nearest you in the space between the dinner tables. Golden never danced for more than a minute. She would see someone new to embrace, or to take by the arm to meet someone else—weaving us all into her social tapestry.
The museum had been created to show art, and did not immediately begin acquiring it, but over the years it had received many donations of art, some of them substantial. By 2000, the museum had seven hundred or so art works. Sims, working with Nancy Lane, a board member whose outstanding collection of African American art would later come to the Studio Museum, appointed the museum’s first acquisitions committee, which actively sought funding to fill gaps in the collection.