Art, Ireland and the Irish Diaspora – 16 December 2020

Art historian Dr Éimear O’Connor joins artist Bernard Canavan to discuss her latest book ‘Art, Ireland and the Irish Diaspora’ (Irish Academic Press, 2020). Art, Ireland, and the Irish Diaspora reveals a labyrinth of social and cultural connections that conspired to create and sustain an image of Ireland for the nation and for the Irish diaspora between 1893 and 1939. This era saw an upsurge of interest among patrons and collectors in New York and Chicago in the ‘Irishness’ of Irish art, which was facilitated by gallery owners, émigrés, philanthropists, and art-world celebrities. O’Connor, explores the ongoing tensions between those in Ireland and the expatriate community in the US, split as they were between tradition and modernity, and between public expectation and political rhetoric, as Ireland sought to forge a post-Treaty international identity through its visual artists. Bernard Canavan joins O’Connor in conversation to discuss her research, art and diaspora more generally and her archival encounters with Jack. B. Yeats, George Russell (AE), Lady Gregory, and Seán Keating, how the Dublin art scene and that in New York and Chicago connected through complex networks and contemporary publications at an extraordinary time in Ireland’s history.

Speaker: Éimear O’Connor

Éimear O’Connor is an Honorary Member of the Royal Hibernian Academy of Arts. She is the author of Seán Keating in Context: Responses to Culture and Politics in Post-Civil War Ireland (2009), Seán Keating: Art, Politics and Building the Irish Nation (IAP, 2013) and Editor of Irish Women Artists 1800-2009: Familiar but Unknown (2010). Follow Éimear on twitter: @artanddiaspora

 

Speaker: Bernard Canavan

Bernard Canavan grew up in Edgeworthstown, Co Longford, in the 1950s. He emigrated to England in 1959 with his father and worked in the usual unskilled emigrant labouring jobs on construction sites and in factories. He returned to work in Dublin as a graphic artist with a display and advertising agency before finally settling in London as a free-lance illustrator for most of the 1960s underground press. Canavan’s paintings are figurative and deal with Irish and emigrant life; in particular of the make do life of Irish people in the UK in the 1950’s and 1960’s. He is represented by Barbara Stanely and Saatchi Art.