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September
30, 1995
Mel
Fisher Maritime Heritage Society
FOR
IMMEDIATE RELEASE
MFMHS’
Burnside Elected to
Florida
Association of Museums’ Board
Dr.
Madeleine Burnside, executive director of the Mel Fisher
Maritime Heritage Society in Key West, was recently
elected to serve on the board of the Florida Association
of Museums and chair the organization’s History
Affinity Group. The statewide membership association is
active in education, lobbying, and networking to support
the activities of Florida’s many museums.
“I’m
very proud, because it’s a great vote of confidence in
the Maritime Heritage Society and our museum,” says
Burnside of her prestigious election. “When we started
competing for state grants in 1991, the institution was
virtually unknown. To go from that to my being chosen
history chair is quite a significant step.”
Burnside,
who has been executive director of the Mel Fisher
Maritime Heritage Society for the past four years, holds
a Ph.D. in the History of Consciousness from the
University of California at Santa Cruz. One of the first
women to be awarded a Harkness Fellowship, she completed
her post-doctoral studies at the Whitney Museum of
American Art in New York. Before relocating to Key West,
she was the executive director of the Islip Art Museum
on Long Island.
Since
taking the helm at the Mel Fisher Maritime Heritage
Society, Burnside has been the guiding force behind the
creation of “A Slave Ship Speaks: The Wreck of the Henrietta
Marie.” The first major museum exhibition in this
country devoted to the transatlantic slave trade, it
centers around artifacts recovered from the site of the Henrietta Marie, an English merchant slaver sunk in the waters off
Key West in 1700. The exhibition will embark on the
first leg of a four-year national tour in early
December. Burnside is currently working on a
comprehensive book about the Henrietta
Marie for Simon & Schuster.
Her
primary goal for the Florida Association of Museums’
History Affinity Group is to increase visibility for the
individual museums within the organization. “The state
has funding for history museums to be more active on the
Internet,” she reports, “and I’m hoping to get the
history consortium together to develop a format so that
each museum can have its own home page. They can use
this forum to make information available to scholars,
potential visitors, and anyone interested in what they
have to offer.”
A
member of the Florida Association of Museums for the
past ten years, the not-for-profit Mel Fisher Maritime
Heritage Society was founded in 1982. Its Key West
museum holds the richest single collection of
17th-century maritime and shipwreck antiquities in the
Western Hemisphere.
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