Mary Edna Sullivan
Sunday, March 17, 2002
10:30 - 5:00
Middleton Place: A Low Country Family's Legacy, 1741 - Present
Location: Room 309, Simons Center for the Arts and Middleton Plantation

Biography: Mary Edna Sullivan is Curator for the Middleton Place Foundation. Since retiring from the Navy Nurse Corps in 1983, Ms. Sullivan has been pursuing a new career in American Material Culture, History, and Historic Preservation. She has studied architecture and historic preservation at the College of Charleston and completed internships at The Charleston Museum, the Hagley Museum and Library, and the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts. She holds Master of Arts degrees from both the University of Delaware and the Cooperstown Graduate Program in History Museum Studies. Just prior to returning to Charleston, Ms. Sullivan was Curator of Costumes, Textiles and Mardi Gras at the Louisiana State Museum in New Orleans.

Synopsis: This session will present a curator's perspective of 260 years of stewardship at Middleton Place, an 18th century rice plantation. Stewardship has not only preserved superb formal gardens that blend harmoniously the French formalism of Le Notre with the English naturalism or picturesque of Jones, Kent, Brown, and Repton, but also assembled an extraordinary collection of paintings, furniture, silver and costumes reflecting the connoisseurship of eight generations of Middletons.

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