Focusing on key works of art, this lecture considers the position of visual art in modern Irish culture from the perspective of the State, the wider public sphere, and the individual artist. Róisín Kennedy will examine the work of artists on view in the Snite Museum's exhibition Who Do We Say We Are? Irish Art 1922 | 2022 alongside the work of other artists active during the founding of the Irish State.
Róisín Kennedy is lecturer in the School of Art History and Cultural Policy at University College Dublin. She is the former Yeats Curator at the National Gallery of Ireland (2006–08), where she curated the exhibitions The Fantastic in Irish Art and Masquerade and Spectacle: The Circus and the Travelling Fair in the Work of Jack B. Yeats. Her research focuses on modern Irish art and its contexts, the role of women as artists, patrons, and facilitators, and censorship. She has published widely on these subjects in edited collections and in the journals CIRCA, Third Text, and The Journal of Art Historiography. She is co-editor and contributor to Harry Clarke and Artistic Visions of the New Irish State (Irish Academic Press, 2018) and Censoring Art: Silencing the Artwork (I.B. Tauris, 2018) and co-editor, with Fintan Cullen, of Sources in Irish Art 2: A Reader (Cork University Press, 2021). Her monograph Art and the Nation State: The Reception of Modern Art in Ireland was published by Liverpool University Press in 2021.
Originally posted at sniteartmuseum.nd.edu/visit-us/events/.