To: Wellesley College Faculty and Staff
From: Paula A. Johnson, President; and Andrew Shennan, Provost and Lia Gelin Poorvu ’56 Dean of the College
Re: News about Lisa Fischman, Ruth Gordon Shapiro ’37 Director of the Davis Museum
Date: June 24, 2024
We are writing to let you know that, after 14 years as the Ruth Gordon Shapiro ’37 Director of the Davis Museum, Lisa Fischman will be leaving Wellesley this summer. Under Lisa’s leadership, the Davis has presented an impressive series of groundbreaking and well-received exhibitions—more than 100, including 33 that she curated—that have solidified the Museum’s reputation as a daring and ambitious cultural institution.
Looking back over her tenure, we can see just how much Lisa and her extraordinary team have accomplished. Since 2010, when Lisa joined the Davis, the Museum has added almost 6,000 works to the collections, with an emphasis on a global diversity of makers and subjects, particularly BIPOC and LGBTQAI+, and on the exceptional quality of the acquisitions. The reinstallation of the permanent collections in 2016 was greeted with much acclaim and crowned a multi-year process of reinventing and updating the Museum’s identity and presentation. And, of course, this year’s reopening was yet another stellar success, especially the phenomenal first major career retrospective exhibition of conceptual artist Lorraine O’Grady ’55.
Lisa has consistently demonstrated a gift for encouraging lively public debate about art. In 2014, the exhibition Tony Matelli: New Gravity, featuring his sculptures Sleepwalker and Stray Dog, sparked impassioned conversation on our campus (and globally) about art, feminism, freedom, and censorship, and about the concepts of public space and safe space. Two years later, after the 2016 presidential election, the project “ART-LESS: “The Davis Without Immigrants” attracted attention and praise on a national and even international scale.
Inventiveness, creative ambition, and commitment to the values that support inclusive excellence have remained hallmarks of Lisa’s directorship over the past 14 years. She has pushed boundaries in terms of inclusion—and has raised the Museum’s visibility in the broader art world.
“This has been an extraordinary run,” Lisa adds. “I am enormously proud and honored to have led the Davis Museum over these 14 years and am pleased to note so many accomplishments during my tenure—from the nuts-and-bolts matters of best museum practices to those of institutional character, academic service, and aspiration. Acquisitions, exhibitions, award-winning publications, yes!; and also Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act compliance, decolonial and DEAI endeavors, and the move to The Museum System collections management database. I will miss my terrific colleagues at Wellesley—and the many fabulous Wellesley alumnae around the world who I have been delighted to know. And I will always be enormously grateful to the Davis staff for their perseverance, generosity of spirit, and collaboration.”
We are grateful for all Lisa has done over the years to expand the Davis’s collections and to make the Museum a more vibrant, cross-disciplinary, and diverse resource for this generation of Wellesley students and faculty. She has brought a spark to our museum that has enlivened the entire campus.
We wish Lisa all the best in the next phase of her professional journey. And we are grateful to Amanda Gilvin, Sonja Novak Koerner ’51 Senior Curator of Collections and associate director for curatorial affairs, and Mary Beth Timm, associate director for operations and collections Management, for stepping into the roles of interim co-directors of the Davis Museum. A search for a permanent new director will be launched next academic year.
