David Furchgott

David Max Furchgott (born May 24, 1947) is an American nonprofit cultural programs manager, arts educator, publisher, and cultural social entrepreneur.

David Furchgott was born in Charleston, South Carolina, to Marcelle and Max Furchgott. His forebears (originally spelled Fürchtgott) moved from Central Europe in the late 19th century to the United States in 1864, eventually settling in Charleston (as well as Atlanta, Georgia and Jacksonville, Florida). They began an early chain of family-owned sundry (department) stores. David Furchgott's father was a trained artist who had trained at the University of South Carolina and the Art Students League in NY; his uncle was Robert Furchgott, the 1998 Nobel Laureate in Medicine and Physiology.

David Furchgott graduated M. Rutledge Rivers High School in Charleston, the first integrated high school in South Carolina. Furchgott was the president of the Southeast Federation of Temple Youth, the five state regional consortium of the Reform Jewish youth movement which was then focused on issues related to social justice and equality.

In 1965, Furchgott attended Tulane University intending to study architecture, then transferred to the University of Miami, graduating with a Bachelor of Education in art education in January 1970, and an incomplete Bachelor of Fine Arts. Having undergone a difficult process to be recognized as a Vietnam-era conscientious objector, Furchgott was required to return to South Carolina to do two years of public service. He taught as an arts and crafts instructor at the South Carolina Habilitation Center, Ladson, SC a facility for developmentally disabled children and adults. During that same period, he helped to start and was the first director of Furthur, Inc., a non-profit organization, that began and operated the Charleston Hotline, which he continued to direct for the following year. The Hotline has continued for over 40 years, now under the auspices of the Trident United Way.

In 1972, Furchgott was hired by the Gibbes Art Gallery (now the Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston's community art museum) as its Curator of Education and Director of its then-financially failing Hastings School of Art. In less than two years Furchgott "more than doubled the school's enrollment" and secured its finances, began a children's art class program, a resource newsletter for public school art instructors, quadrupled the museum's tour program, and initiated a number of public education programs for the museum in community centers and public spaces.

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