Sam Wagstaff

Samuel Jones Wagstaff Jr. (November 4, 1921 – January 14, 1987) was an American art curator and collector. He was the artistic mentor and benefactor of photographer Robert Mapplethorpe and poet-punk rocker Patti Smith. Wagstaff is known in part for his support of minimalism, pop art, conceptual art, and earthworks, but his aesthetic acceptance and support of photography presaged the acceptance of the medium as a fine art.

Early life Samuel Wagstaff was born on November 4, 1921, in New York City. Wagstaff, a grandson of New York State Senator Alfred Wagstaff Jr., a fashion illustrator who had worked for Harper's Bazaar and Vogue and was previously married to Arthur Paul Thomas. He had one sibling, a sister, Judith (Mrs. Thomas Lewis Jefferson). Col. Arthur Emil Piorkowski, married Donald V. Newhall, an artist.

After growing up on Central Park South, attending the Hotchkiss School and graduating from Yale University, and being a fixture on the debutante circuit, Wagstaff joined the US Navy in 1941 as an ensign, where he took part in the D-day landing at Omaha Beach in World War II. He later worked in the field of advertising in the 1950s, which he hated. He returned to school to study Renaissance art at the New York University Institute of Fine Arts, however, and turned his energies to the art world.

Career In 1959, a David E. Finley art history fellowship took him to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. He served as curator of contemporary art at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, from 1961 to 1968. In January 1964, he organized the show Black White + Gray, choosing exhibits presenting what he described as "the sparse aesthetic shared by a number of artists whose work was pared down to a minimum". It is now often referred to as the first survey of Minimalist Art. In 1968, when he was not chosen for the position of museum director, Wagstaff left Hartford for the Detroit Institute of Arts staying to 1971. In addition to his curatorial work, Wagstaff was a noted collector, just like his father, who collected ephemera. After a conflict with the Detroit Institute of Arts' board of trustees over an earthwork by Michael Heizer, which had destroyed the immaculate museum lawn, he moved back to New York. He persuaded gallerist Holly Solomon to represent Mapplethorpe, and she later acknowledged that she "wouldn't have touched Robert without Sam."

Death Wagstaff died of pneumonia arising from AIDS at his home in Manhattan on January 14, 1987. Under Wagstaff's will, Robert Mapplethorpe inherited three-quarters of his estate, worth upward of $7 million, and Wagstaff's lover Jim Nelson received the remaining quarter, while Wagstaff's sister Judith Jefferson was left $10,000. Jefferson contested the will, delaying distribution of the estate.

In 2022, Zachary Quinto played a character in American Horror Story: NYC named Sam Jones who is loosely inspired by Wagstaff's life as an art curator, his relationship with Mapplethorpe, and his death from HIV/AIDS.