James Crump: Mercantile Library

Photo historian James Crump not only curates and writes about photography, he creates collaborations with contemporary artists and photographers. His documentary Black White + Gray, featuring the influential and legendary 1970s and 1980s photography collector Sam Wagstaff, premiered at the 2007 Tribeca Film Festival and Europe’s Art Basel. As co-chair of FotoFocus, planned for 2012, the prolific Crump is helping build connections between institutions and the community to orchestrate a dynamic, cross-regional celebration of photography.

Name: James Crump
 
Job title: Chief Curator, Cincinnati Art Museum
 
City of birth: Jacksonville, North Carolina
 
Years in Cincinnati: 3
 
Neighborhood where you live: Walnut Hills
 
Space that inspires you: Mercantile Library
 
I spent a great deal of time in libraries in my formative years preparing to be a curator and art historian. I’ve been fortunate to work in some of the best designed which can be both calming and inspiring. The Mercantile Library is such a place; an early nineteenth-century member library which shares these attributes and also evokes Cincinnati’s rich history as a center of culture and art production. It possesses a very rarefied vibe and ambience; a salon for creative thinking, reading and writing.
 
Why you live in Cincinnati: I moved here from New York City to work at the Art Museum and the city has grown on me a great deal. Besides having made some wonderful friends, it provides me a great home base from which to travel and return to.
 
If Cincinnati were a tree, it would be an oak. With arguably the largest inventory of nineteenth-century Italianate buildings and its rich cultural history (the Underground Railroad, for example, and the Germanic diaspora) looming large over the city, especially Over-the-Rhine, the oak seems particularly apt to me.