Douglas Crimp

Douglas Crimp (1944-2019) was the Fanny Knapp Allen Professor of Art History at the University of Rochester and the author of On the Museum's Ruins (1993), Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics (2002), "Our Kind of Movie": The Films of Andy Warhol (2012), and Before Pictures (2016). He died in July 2019, as reported by The New York Times. He was the curator of the landmark Pictures exhibition at Artists Space, New York, in 1977 and, from 1977 to 1990, an editor of the journal October, for which he edited the influential special issue AIDS: Cultural Analysis, Cultural Activism in 1987. With Lynne Cooke, he organized the exhibition Mixed Use, Manhattan: Photography and Related Practices 1970s to the Present for the Reina Sofía in Madrid in the summer of 2010, and he was a member of the curatorial team for the 2015 Greater New York exhibition at MoMA PS1. Although Crimp wrote about performance art in the 1970s and edited the first monograph on Joan Jonas in 1983, he began writing about dance only in 2006, when he published "Yvonne Rainer: Muciz Lover" in Grey Room. He subsequently wrote about the work of Merce Cunningham and Trisha Brown for Artforum, and contributed essays for the catalogues of Rainer's exhibition at the Kunsthaus Bregenz and Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker's 2015 exhibition Work, Travail, Arbeid, at WIELS in Brussels.