About Carol Olsen
Carol A. Olsen has expertise in 19th and 20th century ship figureheads. Her first published article on the subject appeared in The International Journal of Nautical Archaeology while in Texas A&M University’s Nautical Archaeology program, and she graduated with a master's degree and a Distinguished Graduate Student award that recognized her already substantial work on the ship figurehead collections at Mystic Seaport Museum in Connecticut, The Mariners’ Museum in Virginia, and consultation she provided to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts during their research for William Rush, American Sculptor.
Carol’s undergraduate studies in Art History, University of California at Berkeley, were influenced by a summer visit to the Maine Maritime Museum in Bath, where she saw ship figureheads for the first time and wondered why these wonderful sculptures were completely absent from her undergraduate art history curriculum. The subject has been a source of independent study and travel ever since.
Carol interspersed ongoing ship figurehead studies, presentations, and writing with a 22-year career in sophisticated satellite communications for ships. Carol now devotes full time to ship carving studies and has contributed new information to private collections in Europe, South America, and the United States.
Carol is currently completing a scholarly book about Nobel Prize-winning poet Pablo Neruda's ship figurehead collection in Chile that is to be published in 2025 by the University of Alabama Press.
Her popularly-written blog at www.hullartships.com preserves stories modern boaters share about the meaning of figureheads, graphics, or other embellishments on their boats. Those objects are ephemeral, boat ownership can be brief, and the collected stories are rare. This lens shows some boaters in a very personal way, from stories read to their children to a town's remembrance of its beloved mascot - a rooster once put on trial for disturbing the peace.
Carol's experience on Mystic’s Special Demonstration Squad after college enabled her to work aloft on the CHARLES W. MORGAN and JOSEPH CONRAD, and to crew on ELISSA in an OpSail parade. She sings sea shanteys, a favorite being “The Old Shipcarver,” and she’s paddled furiously in waterside community dragon boat races.