MEL FISHER MARITIME MUSEUM GOES TO THE MET IN THE BIG APPLE
The Mel Fisher Museum Maritime Heritage Society is hitting the road to New York City in late September to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art where an exhibit containing Colonial silver artifacts from the Mel Fisher collection are on loan.
The trip marks the inaugural voyage of the Museum’s Armada members to different museums across the U.S. and around the world. Activities planned for the trip on September 30-October 1 include a tour of the “Colonial Andes: Tapestries and Silverwork, 1530-1830 exhibit and reception at the Met, a cocktail reception aboard the Waterford hosted by Museum board member Guy Ross and John Evans, a reception and tour at the American Museum of Natural History, lunch on the Westside, and a private tour of the New York Historical Society. The Lucerne is the host hotel.
Space is still available for the trip. For Mel Fisher Maritime Museum Armada members the registration fee is $500; the fee is $600 for Museum members and $650 for non-members. Participants are responsible for travel and hotel arrangements in New York City. For more information or to register, call Lisa Malcom at 294-2633 extension 28. An additional $1,000 contribution gains you membership in the Museum’s Armada.
The exhibition at the Met features more than 175 works on Andean art during the Colonial period, presenting the finest examples of Inca and Colonial garments and tapestries, as well as ritual and domestic silverwork. The Mel Fisher collection contains a number of these pieces and the Met requested that it borrow these pieces for the exhibit.
When the Met called about the Andean pieces, museum director Madeleine Burnside questioned whether the nation’s most prestigious museum would want such pieces from a shipwreck. “Met officials told me,” Burnside said, “you don’t understand. You have some of the only examples that exist from this period and the only samples in existence in America.”
“This illustrates the importance of preserving artifacts from shipwrecks,” Burnside said. “Shipwrecks are like a time capsule that gives us a snapshot of an era.”
Burnside further noted that having museums like the Met request to borrow Mel Fisher collection artifacts is a testament to the prestige and interpretive value of the artifacts and the work that the Mel Fisher museum staff does in restoring artifacts from this era.
The New York trip is the first Armada expedition and other trips are being planned.
The Mel Fisher Maritime Museum is an independent, not for profit 501 c (3) organization that has been nationally accredited by the American Association of Museums. The Museum is dedicated to the exhibition, archaeology, preservation and research of our maritime history in the New World.
