Norma Kershaw

The Cypriot collection of the Ringling Museum in Sarasota, Florida, never had a permanent home or a specialist curator, and was shown partly on outdoor loggias in the 1950s before the weather sent it back into storage¹. Vassos Karageorghis wrote of "a resident of Sarasota in the 1980's, Mrs. Norma Kershaw", who "took particular interest in the collection". She had visited Cyprus several times¹.

In 1983 she organised a colloquium, "New light on ancient Cyprus", in the Asolo Theatre and curated a small exhibition that ran from 14 April to 23 May. She edited the catalogue, Ancient Art from Cyprus: The Ringling Collection, which had introductory chapters by Ellen Herscher on the Bronze Age, Diana Buitron on the Iron Age and David Gordon Mitten on the Hellenistic and Roman periods^1,2. Vassos Karageorghis and Stuart Swiny assisted her¹.

At the end of the colloquium Karageorghis picked a bracelet with snake-head terminals from a box of small objects and asked her to have it cleaned. It proved to be silver, and it began his own work on the collection¹.