Biography

About the Artist

Genevieve Flynn has spent more than fifty years in conversation with precious metals — shaping, chasing, raising, and engraving silver, gold, and platinum into objects designed to outlast their maker and become, in time, family heirlooms.

Her work has earned recognition at the highest levels of the field, both nationally and internationally. In 2015 she received a second-place International Design Award at the prestigious Saul Bell Competition — one of the most coveted honors in the jewelry and metalsmithing world. A decade later, in 2025, she was invited to exhibit thirteen works at the Florence International Biennalé, one of the world's most distinguished forums for fine art and design. Juried by an international panel of judges and placed in the Designer Room — a designation reserved for artists of exceptional technical and artistic merit — she received second place as a Designer, with her Two Birds Vase among the works that earned that recognition.

Private commissions have taken her work into equally distinguished company: a hand mirror, intricately chased and engraved, presented to music industry personality Paula Abdul; and a commemorative 1985 World Series pin created for the late Ewing Kauffman, then owner of the Kansas City Royals and founder of Marion Laboratories.

Flynn holds degrees in jewelry design, jewelry repair, and hand engraving, and spent seven years as a bench jeweler building the foundational construction skills that underpin everything she makes. She went on to study hollowware design under Heikki Seppa — the modern father of form emphasis through anticlastic and synclastic raising — and later deepened her practice through study in chasing and repoussé under Italian master instructor Fabrizio Acquafresca and distinguished artist Valentin Yotkov. The influence of those masters is visible throughout her work, in the discipline of her surfaces and the ambition of her forms.

As committed to the transmission of craft as to its practice, Flynn has devoted much of her career to teaching the technical intricacies of working in precious metals. Her greatest point of pride in that work is the Metal Arts Visiting Master's Program — a teaching initiative she created to bring national and international master-level instructors in jewelry and hollowware to her studio, drawing students from across the country for the rare opportunity to study with a specialized master in an intimate setting. In this, as in her making, she has always understood that the work is larger than any single pair of hands.

IMAGE: Genevieve receiving her 2015 Saul Bell International Award with Mr. Bell presenting, Albuquerque, NM