Fischman named director of Wellesley’s Davis

Lisa Fischman has been named the new director of Wellesley College’s Davis Museum and Cultural Center, replacing David Mickenberg, who resigned in September 2008. Mickenberg later said he left to take responsibility after it was revealed (by Geoff Edgers) that the museum lost its 1921 Fernand Leger painting “Woman and Child” on his watch. In September, Mickenberg became executive director of the Taubman Museum of Art in Roanoke, Virginia.

Fischman, who is expected to begin work at the Davis on Feb. 1, has been chief curator at the University of Arizona Museum of Art in Tucson since 2005 and was gallery director at the Atlanta College of Art from 2000 to 2005. She was associate curator of contemporary art and education at the State University of New York at Buffalo Art Gallery, where she taught in the departments of art, art history and media study from 1997 to 2000. Prior to that, she worked for the departments of new media and education at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.

Fun fact: Her doctoral dissertation at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, was titled “Coonskin Fever: Frontier Adventures in Postwar American Culture,” Tuscon Weekly reported in 2005, which “turned a curious eye on the popular Disney TV show ['Davy Crocket'], on the kids who watched it in coonskin caps, on the moms who lined their kitchens with knotty pine cabinets.”

Fischman told the newspaper then, “The things that interest me are the surprising connections between spheres that generally don't intersect.”

(Ms. Fischman please meet DeCordova Director Dennis Kois, author of master’s thesis on “Disney and Museums: Simulacra, Education, and a Blueprint for Competition.")

Wellesley College President H. Kim Bottomly said in a prepared statement that Fischman’s “appointment reinforces Wellesley’s commitment to excellence in the arts – in fact, when we put administrative hiring on hold during the budget crisis last year, this was the one search we allowed to go forward.”

Assistant director Dennis McFadden, who has served as acting director since Mickenberg’s departure, will return to his regular job.