Culture Chronicle

Pulling Museum Mile Uptown
The New York Times - June 21, 2010
By Kate Taylor

She was sometimes by his side when William C. Thompson Jr. worked the rubber-chicken circuit last year, a poised, attractive woman in no rush to pose for the cameras, confident that her husband, the New York City comptroller, could make his own case for why he deserved to be mayor.

Elsie McCabe Thompson was perhaps an underused asset in her husband's narrowly unsuccessful campaign against Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. Smart, articulate and charming, she emerged infrequently from the shadows to talk to reporters. When she did, she often also spoke of something else dear to her heart: the Museum for African Art.

Now after more than a decade pursuing what some saw as an impossible quest Mrs. Thompson is preparing to open the museum's new $95 million home on upper Fifth Avenue next spring.

"Maybe I'm just contrary," she said during an interview this month, "but the more people tell me it can't be done, the more I want to prove that it can."

Even as her husband steps back (temporarily, he says) from public life, Mrs. Thompson has emerged as the increasingly visible president of the 26-year-old museum as it completes an unlikely journey from a temporary office in Queens to Manhattan's cultural center stage.

On Fifth Avenue between 109th and 110th Streets, the museum will occupy the lower floors of a 19-story condominium designed by Robert A. M. Stern and will extend New York's Museum Mile uptown into Harlem. The limestone-colored building, with window mullions that lyrically evoke the weave of African baskets, will become a high-profile showplace for one of the only two major American museums devoted solely to African art. (The other is the Smithsonian's National Museum of African Art in Washington.) For the full article, click here