James Crump

Black White + Gray: A Portrait of Sam Wagstaff and Robert Mapplethorpe

James Crump

Pierre Apraxine, Dick Cavett

Crump directed the feature-length documentary film Black White + Gray: A Portrait of Sam Wagstaff + Robert Mapplethorpe, which premiered in North America at the 2007 Tribeca Film Festival and in Europe at Art Basel. It explores the influence curator Sam Wagstaff, photographer Robert Mapplethorpe and musician/poet Patti Smith had on the 1970s art scene in New York City.

Antonio Lopez 1970: Sex Fashion & Disco

James Crump

Joan Juliet Buck, Paul Caranicas

Sex Fashion and Disco is a documentary film concerning Antonio Lopez (1943-1987), the most influential fashion illustrator of 1970s Paris and New York, and his colorful and sometimes outrageous milieu.

Troublemakers: The Story of Land Art

James Crump

The titular troublemakers are the New York–based Land (aka Earth) artists of the 1960s and 70s, who walked away from the reproducible and the commodifiable, migrated to the American Southwest, worked with earth and light and seemingly limitless space, and rethought the question of scale and the relationships between artist, landscape, and viewer. Director James Crump has meticulously constructed Troublemakers from interviews (with Germano Celant, Virginia Dwan, and others), photos and footage of Walter De Maria, Michael Heizer, Robert Smithson, Nancy Holt, and Charles Ross among others at work on their astonishing creations.

Spit Earth: Who is Jordan Wolfson?

James Crump

Jordan Wolfson, Jack Bankowsky

Spit Earth: Who Is Jordan Wolfson? is a feature documentary film about this controversial and divisive artist who in the ensuing five years has only solidified his stature with unnerving and provocative new works that elicit extreme reactions from both critical naysayers and vocal proponents alike. Wolfson is not content to play by the rules of a conservative self-policing art market that favors the status quo, instead preferring to make us squirm as he engages a host of lightning-rod issues facing our society today; homophobia, misogyny, racism, white nationalism, antisemitism and violence to name but a few. Wolfson is an art maker on the world stage whose immersive works take on today’s endemic virtue signaling and politically correct narratives, veritably throwing it all back into our faces.

Breuer's Bohemia

James Crump

This documentary surveys a collection of private homes designed by iconic architect-designer Marcel Breuer for his most politically progressive clients between the 1950s and 1970s. More than clients, in fact, these patrons were friends with whom Breuer shared a close-knit and sometimes hedonistic community that included a Who's Who of postwar-era artists, thinkers, and visionaries.