Richard Flood, a curator who worked at the New Museum and P.S. 1 in New York and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, has died at the age of 81. A former director of Barbara Gladstone Gallery, he also worked as a managing editor for Artforum, and taught at the Rhode Island Institute of Art and Design, The Royal College of Art in London and the National College of Art and Design in Dublin.
Flood was chief curator at the Walker Art Center for a decade from 1995, where he curated shows on the Young British Artists, including Damien Hirst and Gillian Wearing, at a time when the group were still in the ascendent, as well as Matthew Barney, Sigmar Polke and the Arte Povera movements.
In his subsequent post at the New Museum, his first exhibition in 2007 focused on the ‘antimonumental’ object in the twenty-first century. He worked as director of special projects at the museum from 2010 until his retirement in 2019. During this time he founded IdeasCity, a New Museum initiative that aimed to bring artists and exhibitions to cities around the United States.
A regular contributor to Artforum, Parker and Frieze, a collection of his written work from over forty years was published in 2017, titled Notes from the Playground.
During a 2011 interview with Creative Process, Flood reflected on the importance of the arts and humanities: ‘They make life liveable’.
‘Art was his vocation not his career,’ critic Hilton Als wrote in tribute to Flood following news of his death. ‘He had no other choice when it came to its splendors and complications but to love it.’
