Before Christmas, Stephen Fleischman, longtime leader of the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, came in to see the print collection at the museum.

“It was this visit Steve made with Barbara, his wife, and his oncologist to see the art,” said Katie Howarth Ryan. “And here Steve comes in, and he’s frail and thin but he’s bright and interested. And I just got this huge flashback to 1991.

“He’s so amazing. Just the fact that he came in, and he wanted to show some works in the collection to his doctor. … I started tearing up.”

Fleischman, a beloved figure in Madison’s art world for more than three decades, died on Jan. 14. He’d been in treatment for an aggressive T-cell intestinal lymphoma since December 2022. He was 69. 

“He was good at communicating with so many people, but he wasn’t overbearing,” said Ryan, currently the interim director of curatorial for MMoCA. “He was soft spoken. He would often say something funny or low key with a little smile. … He had a way to include people with varying experience and knowledge of the arts.”

A season of expansion 

Stephen Fleischman met his wife, Barbara Katz, when they were both in graduate school at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In 1983, Fleischman completed a master’s degree at the Bolz Center for Arts Administration, then took a position at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, where Martin Friedman became a mentor.

“I think those eight years that Steve spent at the Walker working directly with Martin were incredibly formative,” Katz said, “in guiding Steve, and inspiring Steve, about how an outstanding museum is run. He brought many of those elements to Madison.”

Fleischman and Katz returned to Madison in 1991 to lead the Madison Art Center. Fleischman was 36, and Katz was pregnant with their second child. 

“At the time, the business manager knew Steve,” said Valerie Kazamias, a longtime museum volunteer, donor and close family friend, now a MMoCA life trustee. “He said to us as a committee, ‘Why don’t we ask Fleischman? He’s up at the Walker, making great strides in the art world.’ And I said, ‘But he’s so young!’

“But we invited him, and he came with Barbara and their toddler son. If we were both in town, I saw him every day. We didn’t inherit each other; we chose to be family.”

Fleischman’s 27-year tenure at Madison’s downtown art museum saw expansion internally and externally. While state funding for arts in Wisconsin remained low, Fleischman and curator of education Sheri Castelnuovo expanded programs for kids and kept admission free. The museum took on more ambitious exhibitions.

Kazamias said that Fleischman tripled the revenue of the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art Foundation. Fleischman was both friendly with docents and savvy with donors, taking small groups on trips to Art Basel in Miami, the Venice Biennale, or to New York to see a Richard Prince show.

At the museum, Fleischman highlighted Wisconsin artists with national reputations. He established a major collection of Chicago Imagist prints, and encouraged staff to pursue exhibitions they were passionate about.

“He did T.L. Solien and Fred Stonehouse and Leslie Smith III and Warrington Colescott and Martha Glowacki,” said Ryan. Fleischman shepherded exhibitions by Jaume Plensa and the artist duo ChanSchatz, the Clayton Brothers and Joel Shapiro.

“The openings were fantastic because they were multigenerational,” Ryan said. “There’d be donors and artists and students and volunteers.” 

Fleischman expanded the museum’s reach statewide, too. The process for the Wisconsin Triennial evolved from curators wrestling with slides and projectors to a group of evaluators who would crisscross the state every few years, looking for the most exciting artists.

“Selecting the Wisconsin Triennial is not about personal preference,” Fleischman said in a 2013 interview. “It has much more to do with, ‘This work needs to be seen by a broad audience. It’s relevant. It’s packed with ideas. It plays off other ideas in the history of art.’

“You can have great respect for an artwork and know for certain it should be seen, (even if) it doesn’t speak to you personally.”

A new building, a new name

In 2003, the Madison Art Center met industry standards to become a museum. That name change, Kazamias said, “was not something that anybody could do.”

“They had to earn that,” she said. “They qualified, that’s important. They qualified to be a museum, and that’s why the name changed.”

Fleischman worked with architect Cesar Pelli, designer of the Overture Center, on the iconic design, which included 9,000 square feet of museum gallery space.

“One thing that really resonated with Steve was Pelli’s integration of inside and outside by using the glass,” Katz said. “To really juxtapose the play between those on the street and what’s happening in the museum, and almost have a kind of transparency. To allow the museum to really emphasize its welcoming culture.”

The museum reopened in 2006, during the second phase of Overture’s construction. Curator Jane Simon joined the museum that year.

“Steve was able to marry (knowledge of art) with incredible fiscal responsibility,” she said. “He was the director of the museum, but he was also the chief development officer, and essentially the chief curator.

“As a boss, as a manager and a leader, he was very measured and deliberate and focused,” she added. “He was incredibly generous with his time and insight. He was always thinking.”

Simon recalled a major coup for the museum in 2008, when it was able to bring in a George Segal exhibition that included “Depression Bread Line” (1991).

“George Segal had signed off on the art world. He was done with it,” Simon recalled. “Nobody had been able to do a George Segal show. Martin (Friedman) called George’s niece, and said ‘I’m sending Steve out.’ And that’s how we got to work with George Segal’s family, because Steve was so sweet with them.”

Simon said that Fleischman had visited the family in New Jersey three times before she went along.

“They never would have let anyone in, if Steve wasn’t as genuine and authentic as he was,” she said. “We were able to navigate those very difficult waters.”

Cultural contributions

Even Madisonians who’ve never been inside the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art may recognize contributions Fleischman had a hand in. For one, there’s the building itself.

“He oversaw that gorgeous Cesar Pelli design that the museum is lucky enough to occupy,” said Leah Kolb, a former curator. 

The question mark sculpture outside Madison’s Central Library branch? Fleischman had a hand in that too.

“When the new library was going in, he helped us handle the art,” said Karin Wolf, the city’s arts administrator. For those who remember, R&R studios — Roberto Behar and Rosario Marquardt — had a 2008 exhibition called The Absent City that lined the entire “prow” of the art museum on Henry and State streets with colorful strips of vinyl. R&R returned to make the question mark, too.

Wolf remembers how energetic Fleischman was. He ran marathons, and when she’d show up early at the museum (she taught classes for awhile) he would have already been to a spin class. When Wolf took the arts job at the city, she relied on Fleischman as a mentor. 

“It was much more political than I anticipated,” she said. “You know, not everybody’s thrilled about spending money on art, and I didn’t know how to handle it. … He mentored me. He would calm me down.”

Kolb knew of Fleischman’s family when she was growing up, and they kept in touch after she left. She believes Fleischman will be remembered for “making the museum a vital contributor to the cultural life of the city, and giving people an opportunity professionally to grow there.”

“He worked so quietly behind the scenes,” Kolb said. “He wasn’t one to promote himself, but he had a massive impact on different areas of the cultural landscape of Madison. … He just led with such a quiet gracefulness and steady hand. That really allowed the museum to grow in a way that would have otherwise been really difficult.”

Memories at MMoCA

Fleischman chose Madison deliberately. He put down roots and built relationships. Ultimately he stayed at the museum for 27 years, in an industry where it’s common for leaders to move around. 

“He’s had opportunities to go to bigger museums in bigger cities and didn’t,” Marc Vitale, then the president of MMoCA’s Board of Trustees, said in 2019 when Fleischman announced his retirement. “Steve’s been a transformational leader for the museum. Madison’s a better place to live because of Steve.”

Fleischman told a reporter in 1997 that his oddest job was “unloading freight trains.” He said his hero was his son, Benjamin.

Fleischman and Katz have three children, Danny, Ben and Jake. Ben, their middle son, was born with a brain tumor. At age 2, he had a hemispherectomy, or the removal of part of his brain.

Now 32, Ben lives with developmental disabilities, and Katz has been advocating for him for the duration of his life. She serves as the director of Family Voices of Wisconsin, and is a former chair of the Wisconsin Board for People with Developmental Disabilities.

“They’re just an exceptional family in every way,” said Leslie Genszler, who was MMoCA’s director of retail and led the museum store for decades until 2020.

“When he was sick, he was in the hospital, and he called up to see how I was,” Genszler said. “I was suffering from some pretty big depression. And he was he was worried about a former employee, you know? That’s the kind of guy he was. He always thought of other people.”

In April 2023, Katz began posting updates about Fleischman’s progress on CaringBridge. As she posted about clinical trials and chemotherapy, nearly 10,000 people interacted with the site, she said.

In recent weeks, she said, former staff members at the museum have posted memories of passing by Fleischman’s office and hearing “peals of laughter” coming from behind the door.

“Steve and I laughed a lot together, and humor was really important to us in both challenging times and funny times,” she said.

“We were talking with our rabbi, getting ready for Steve’s service, and one of the things that came up first and foremost was Steve’s integrity,” Katz added. “His respect for all of those who touched the museum, whether it be donors or collectors or artists or visitors or schoolchildren, and especially all of his staff members.”

Fleischman’s service was held on Thursday, Jan. 18 at Temple Beth El. A spring lecture series, endowed as the Stephen Fleischman Lectureship, will continue at the museum this April. Those who want to pass on memories can do so through the museum, Katz said, and the family will see them. Kazamias encouraged donations in Fleischman’s memory be made to the MMoCA Foundation. 

Some would like to see the museum name a gallery for Fleischman. Katz didn’t think he would want that.

“Steve was very humble,” she said. “He never really never took credit for the museum’s success himself. He always attributed the success to his board and staff.”