Crystal Z Campbell

Crystal Z Campbell

Birth : 1980-01-01, United States

History

Crystal Z Campbell is a multidisciplinary artist, experimental filmmaker, and writer of African American, Filipino, and Chinese descents. Campbell finds complexity in public secrets— fragments of information known by many but untold or unspoken. Recent works revisit questions of immortality and medical ethics with Henrietta Lacks' “immortal” cell line, ponder the role of a political monument and displacement in a Swedish coastal landscape, and salvage a 35mm film from a demolished Black activist theater in Brooklyn as a relic of gentrification. Sonic, material, and archival traces of the witness informs their work in film, performance, installation, sound, painting, and writing. Honors and awards include the Pollock-Krasner Award; MAP Fund; MacDowell; MAAA, Skowhegan; Rijksakademie; Whitney ISP; Franklin Furnace; Tulsa Artist Fellowship; Black Spatial Relics, and Flaherty Film Seminar, amongst others. Selec exhibitions include the Drawing Center (US), Nest (NL), ICA-Philadelphia (US), REDCAT (US), Artissima (IT), Studio Museum of Harlem (US), Project Row Houses (US), and SculptureCenter (US), and SFMOMA (US). Campbell’s writing has been featured in World Literature Today, Monday Journal, GARAGE, and Hyperallergic. Campbell is a Harvard Radcliffe Film Study Center & David and Roberta Logie Fellow (2020-2021) living and working in Oklahoma. Campbell is founder of the virtual programming platform archiveacts.com.

Profile

Crystal Z Campbell

Movies

Revolver
Revolver
Director
An archive of pareidolia (a situation in which someone sees a pattern or image of something that does not exist) narrated by a descendent of Exodusters.
A MEDITATION ON NATURE IN THE ABSENCE OF AN ECLIPSE
A MEDITATION ON NATURE IN THE ABSENCE OF AN ECLIPSE
Cinematography
Running like water, an eclipse streams glimpses of irreversible consequence.
A MEDITATION ON NATURE IN THE ABSENCE OF AN ECLIPSE
A MEDITATION ON NATURE IN THE ABSENCE OF AN ECLIPSE
Sound
Running like water, an eclipse streams glimpses of irreversible consequence.
A MEDITATION ON NATURE IN THE ABSENCE OF AN ECLIPSE
A MEDITATION ON NATURE IN THE ABSENCE OF AN ECLIPSE
Editor
Running like water, an eclipse streams glimpses of irreversible consequence.
A MEDITATION ON NATURE IN THE ABSENCE OF AN ECLIPSE
A MEDITATION ON NATURE IN THE ABSENCE OF AN ECLIPSE
Director
Running like water, an eclipse streams glimpses of irreversible consequence.
Viewfinder
Viewfinder
Cinematography
Filmed entirely in Swedish spa town, VIEWFINDER takes cues from political gestures, and decisive movements to explore belonging, allyship, and monuments.
Viewfinder
Viewfinder
Editor
Filmed entirely in Swedish spa town, VIEWFINDER takes cues from political gestures, and decisive movements to explore belonging, allyship, and monuments.
Viewfinder
Viewfinder
Writer
Filmed entirely in Swedish spa town, VIEWFINDER takes cues from political gestures, and decisive movements to explore belonging, allyship, and monuments.
Viewfinder
Viewfinder
Director
Filmed entirely in Swedish spa town, VIEWFINDER takes cues from political gestures, and decisive movements to explore belonging, allyship, and monuments.
Currency
Currency
Director
CURRENCY (2019) is a sound film of refusal––a woman wears bygone forms of currency on the tips of her hair while preserving the greatest currency for herself.
Go-Rilla Means War
Go-Rilla Means War
Writer
Go-Rilla Means War derives from a decayed 35mm film discovered in the abandoned Slave Theatre, once the center of Black culture and civil rights organizing in Brooklyn. Featuring Black men in various states of martial arts training, the film's faded and discolored frames are a metonym for the media demonization of Black bodies in the context of the gentrification of Bedford-Stuyvesant.
Go-Rilla Means War
Go-Rilla Means War
Editor
Go-Rilla Means War derives from a decayed 35mm film discovered in the abandoned Slave Theatre, once the center of Black culture and civil rights organizing in Brooklyn. Featuring Black men in various states of martial arts training, the film's faded and discolored frames are a metonym for the media demonization of Black bodies in the context of the gentrification of Bedford-Stuyvesant.
Go-Rilla Means War
Go-Rilla Means War
Narrator
Go-Rilla Means War derives from a decayed 35mm film discovered in the abandoned Slave Theatre, once the center of Black culture and civil rights organizing in Brooklyn. Featuring Black men in various states of martial arts training, the film's faded and discolored frames are a metonym for the media demonization of Black bodies in the context of the gentrification of Bedford-Stuyvesant.
Go-Rilla Means War
Go-Rilla Means War
Director
Go-Rilla Means War derives from a decayed 35mm film discovered in the abandoned Slave Theatre, once the center of Black culture and civil rights organizing in Brooklyn. Featuring Black men in various states of martial arts training, the film's faded and discolored frames are a metonym for the media demonization of Black bodies in the context of the gentrification of Bedford-Stuyvesant.
On the Way to the Moon, We Discovered the Earth
On the Way to the Moon, We Discovered the Earth
Director
On the Way to the Moon, We Discovered the Earth is a historical remix of the New York Times newspaper printed during the New York City Blackout in 1977. The 1977 Blackout is unofficially credited with the formal birth of hip-hop, a movement that was already well underway but advanced with equipment looted during the riots.
Futures for Failures
Futures for Failures
Director
An exhalation of social and architectural failures under the guise of possible futures.
Witness
Witness
Director
A sonic meditation on the camera as a witness and the so-called ‘landscape of violence.’ 8mm
A Dark Love Story For Clowns
A Dark Love Story For Clowns
Cinematography
A Dark Love Story For Clowns is a hybrid of an African ritual, an autobiographical anecdote, and a modern riff of a post-abolitionist short story by William Faulkner.
A Dark Love Story For Clowns
A Dark Love Story For Clowns
Producer
A Dark Love Story For Clowns is a hybrid of an African ritual, an autobiographical anecdote, and a modern riff of a post-abolitionist short story by William Faulkner.
A Dark Love Story For Clowns
A Dark Love Story For Clowns
Writer
A Dark Love Story For Clowns is a hybrid of an African ritual, an autobiographical anecdote, and a modern riff of a post-abolitionist short story by William Faulkner.
A Dark Love Story For Clowns
A Dark Love Story For Clowns
Sound
A Dark Love Story For Clowns is a hybrid of an African ritual, an autobiographical anecdote, and a modern riff of a post-abolitionist short story by William Faulkner.
A Dark Love Story For Clowns
A Dark Love Story For Clowns
Editor
A Dark Love Story For Clowns is a hybrid of an African ritual, an autobiographical anecdote, and a modern riff of a post-abolitionist short story by William Faulkner.
A Dark Love Story For Clowns
A Dark Love Story For Clowns
Director
A Dark Love Story For Clowns is a hybrid of an African ritual, an autobiographical anecdote, and a modern riff of a post-abolitionist short story by William Faulkner.
FLIGHT
FLIGHT
Director
Flourishing Black townships of Oklahoma in the 1920’s––an archival record of communities in exile, awash in colors deemed “impossible."