WELLESLEY, MASS.- Lisa Fischman, Ruth Gordon Shapiro ’37 Director of the Davis, has announced the appointments of Claire Whitner as Associate Curator and Meredith Fluke as the Kemper Curator of Academic Programs at the Davis Museum at Wellesley College.

Claire Whitner joins the Davis from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where she held the position of Curatorial Research Fellow for Old Master paintings for five years. In this capacity, she worked on the reinstallation of the permanent collection and a number of special exhibitions, including Luis Meléndez: Master of the Spanish Still Life (January–March 2010), The Art of the Still Life (September 2011–February 2012), and Rank and Status in the Age of Rembrandt and Vermeer (October 2015–January 2016).

Dr. Whitner is a specialist in modern German visual culture. She received her Ph.D., entitled “The Visual Culture of Surface: Berlin Modernism and the Pictorial Public,” from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2008. While in graduate school in California, Whitner held curatorial and research positions at the Skirball Cultural Center and the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. She has a flair for languages with fluency in German, a strong command of Dutch, and reading knowledge of French, Spanish, and Italian. In addition to her museum work, Whitner has remained active in her area of expertise by presenting papers at conferences in the United States and abroad and publishing her scholarly work.

In her role as Associate Curator, Dr. Whitner curated the current exhibition New View: 2014 Faculty Exhibition; and is collaborating with Dr. Eve Straussman-Pflanzer, Assistant Director of Curatorial Affairs/Senior Curator of Collections, on the reinstallation of the permanent galleries at the Davis, scheduled to open in fall 2016.

Meredith Fluke has been appointed Kemper Curator of Academic Programs, a position that focuses on the permanent collections at the Davis and works to engage faculty and students from the arts, humanities and sciences in inventive, cross-disciplinary projects and exhibitions. The Kemper Curator spearheads collaborative, collections-based projects and exhibitions based on Wellesley College faculty research and teaching interests.

Dr. Fluke began her museum career at the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago, where she trained both undergraduate and graduate students in museum education outreach. Fluke received her Ph.D. in medieval art and architecture in 2012 from Columbia University with a dissertation entitled: “Building Across the Sacred Landscape: The Romanesque Churches of Verona in their Urban Context.” She received the Samuel H. Kress Foundation Fellowship for Study at the Bibliotheca Hertziana in Rome (2007-09) and the Chester Dale Pre-Doctoral Fellowship at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2009-10). She has done additional fieldwork at the Church of Hagia Sophia in Vize, Turkey (2004/2005) as well as studied the Romanesque Churches in the Bourbonnais, France.

Dr. Fluke has lectured extensively—the Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Cloisters—and has held positions at the Museum of Biblical Art and the Brooklyn Museum. She was Associate Museum Educator at The Cloisters for five years and comes to the Davis from Columbia University, where she was a Post-Doctoral Fellow and Core Lecturer in the Humanities since 2012.

Upon announcing their appointments, Dr. Fischman commented, “We are thrilled to have Claire Whitner and Meredith Fluke join the Davis curatorial team. Claire’s strong research background and extensive experience at the MFA will be invaluable in the reinstallation of our permanent collections. Meredith brings to her new position a combination of impressive scholarly credentials, teaching experience, and curatorial work with collections; as well as the exceptional capacity to bridge the museum and departmental spheres across disciplines.”