Russell Flinchum

Russell Flinchum is a native of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and earned his B.A. in english and M.A. in art history at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He moved to New York in 1985 to attend the Graduate School of the City University of New York, receiving his Ph.D. in Art History in 1998. In 1990, Flinchum became the first Peter Krueger/Christie’s Fellow at Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum. In 1992, he was named guest curator for the exhibition Henry Dreyfuss: Directing Design. The exhibition, which opened in March 1997, received enthusiastic reviews and a number of important awards, as did the accompanying book, Henry Dreyfuss, Industrial Designer: the Man in the Brown Suit. In 1998, Flinchum became the archivist of the Century Association Archives Foundation, where he oversees work on the historical records of this important cultural institution. In 2001, with Shoji Sadao, he curated the exhibition “Buckminster Fuller/Shoji Sadao” for the Century, which traveled to Milton Academy and Stanford University. American Design, his most recent book, was published by The Museum of Modern Art and 5 Continents in 2008. He currently teaches design history in the MFA Program in design criticism at New York’s School of Visual Arts.

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