Samuel Jones Wagstaff Jr. (November 4, 1921 – January 14, 1987) was an American art curator, collector, and the artistic mentor and benefactor of photographer Robert Mapplethorpe (who was also his lifetime companion) and poet-punk rocker Patti Smith.

Mar 28, 2016 · Sam Wagstaff began collecting photographs when few were. Now, an exhibition at Los Angeles's Getty Museum proves how influential his trove was — and not just for his lover Robert Mapplethorpe.

Jan 5, 1997 · DOWNTOWN CHRONICLES about Sam Wagstaff, the collector of photography who championed Robert Mapplethorpe. The aristocratic Wagstaff was born in New York in 1921. He transformed the landscape of...

Long-time companion of Robert Mapplethorpe, Wagstaff curated Tony Smith’s first solo show (at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, in 1967), and he was also the curator behind Michael Heizer’s Dragged Mass Displacement (1971), in which bulldozers hauled a 35-tonne monolith across the Detroit Institute of Arts’ pristine north ...

It's the first major biography of Sam Wagstaff, a name as obscure as Mapplethorpe's is infamous. Sam was conspicuously known as the lover, mentor, and patron of Robert Mapplethorpe," Gefter...

Sep 17, 2016 · Before Samuel J. Wagstaff Jr. (1921–1987) began amassing his unprecedented private collection of photography in 1973, he had been a groundbreaking museum curator at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art (1961–68) and at the Detroit Institute of Arts (1968–71).