Richard Flood, a curator who held high-ranking posts at New York’s New Museum and Minneapolis’s Walker Art Center, has died at 81. A spokesperson for the New Museum, where Flood was once chief curator, confirmed his passing on Tuesday.
Across several decades of curating, Flood organized a range of acclaimed exhibitions, from ones dealing with ascendant British contemporary art stars to surveys of emergent stylistic trends. Running across his diverse output was a desire to be ahead of the curve, to show where art was headed next.
“We only have so much time to put things in front of the public, and we better have a good reason why we’re our coworkers time and why we think it’s going to mean something to the public,” Flood told the podcast the Creative Process in 2021, speaking of his curatorial thought process.
Yet his output expanded far beyond the shows he organized for museums. He served as a managing editor to Artforum and later contributed to Frieze. He was a director at Gladstone Gallery. He founded IdeasCity, a roving New Museum–organized arts initiative thought brought artists and art events to cities across the US.
Flood had strong opinions and was unafraid to voice them. Of Andy Warhol’s art, he once wrote in Artforum, “Because so many of the subjects in the series have such graphic consistency within popular culture, there is nothing much Warhol can do to interestingly represent them.” He once compared art bloggers to “prairie dogs,” spurring an online outcry among writers. Yet whether one agreed with his positions or not, he held strong views at a time when few other curators did, and that made his work admirable.
In doing so, he stuck up for the artists he cared about most deeply. This much can be seen in his longtime support of Matthew Barney, whose 1999 film Cremaster 2, one of five works in the famed 1994–2002 “Cremaster Cycle,” Flood debuted at the Walker Art Center. When the Walker Art Center acquired the work with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2000, it became the only museum at the time to hold all the “Cremaster” films then in existence.
Flood’s first major show for the Walker was 1995’s “Brilliant!: New Art from London,” which built on a 1992 show of young British artists at Barbara Gladstone Gallery that he curated with Clarissa Dalrymple. The large-scale Walker show took stock of recent developments in a country whose art scene was being led by a range of rising talents, from Damien Hirst to Gillian Wearing. In her New York Times review, Roberta Smith wrote that the Walker show “gets credit for tackling a large and lively subject at a time when many museums and international exhibitions have less and less time for new art.”
Richard Flood and Glenn Ligon.
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He remained chief curator at the Walker until 2005, the year that he left the New Museum. By that point, working closely with director Kathy Halbreich, the Walker’s collection increased by 40 percent during Flood’s time there. He had also curated shows about Sigmar Polke, Robert Gober, and the Zero and Arte Povera movements.
Flood joined the New Museum as it was expanded; it opened in an enlarged form with his 2007 show “Unmonumental: The Object in the 21st Century,” a sort of anti–Jeff Koons impulse to rely upon small objects, many of which were grouped together to form assemblages. Future shows would include a two-person exhibition for Daniel Guzmán and Steven Shearer.
In 2010, Flood transitioned to being New Museum’s director of special projects and curator at large. He retired in 2019, two years after putting out an anthology of his writings called Notes from the Playground.
On social media, some in New York have begun to memorialize Flood. Critic Hilton Als wrote on Instagram, “Art was his vocation not his career; he had no other choice when it came to its splendors and complications but to love it. He supported a number of people who had less trouble with shyness than he did, and he never objected to others taking credit for his intelligence.”
