The Juxtaposing Visions Exhibitions and Lectures: An Arts Event in Galway

Abstract

marily to two hugely successful and popular annual festivals, the Galway Arts Festival and the Cuirt International Festival of Literature. In Galway, however, the “arts” in “arts festival” usually means drama, music, and literature; typically, the visual arts are given a half a page or so at the back of the fifteen-page festival program. Compared to other Irish cities of similar size, Galway has the fewest visual art spaces for nonprofit, commercial, and educational art groups and artists. Limerick and Sligo can boast valuable art collections housed in municipal galleries with continued investment in collecting twentieth-century Irish art. Recently, rumors of both a possible municipal gallery and a new museum space for Galway have floated through the city. With neither of these in place in the year , the fact is that the Galway community has been starved for interaction with the visual arts. From September to November, , the National University of Ireland, Galway, hosted An Introduction to Contemporary Irish Art, a series of free public lectures. In conjunction with the series, the university’s Art Gallery housed from September  to October  an exhibition of selected Irish artworks from the Irish Museum of Modern Art titled Juxtaposing Visions. Attendance astounded the organizers, and crowds at the evening lecture series ranged from one to two hundred people, proving an immense interest. The National University of Ireland, Galway, does not have a particularly active history of involvement in the visual arts. Although the art gallery has long existed, normally it is loaned out to area artists or to local groups to hang exhibitions; the university only rarely hosts and funds exhibitions. The gallery’s location in the basement of the Quadrangle —the oldest, yet most beautiful building on campus – may also contribute to its low profile. Some of the more impressive contemporary art spaces in Ireland are housed in older colonial constructs; the Irish Museum of Modern Art itself has transformed the former Kilmainhaim Hospital for convalescing British soldiers, the Model Arts Center in Sligo has recently revamped the former model school built in , and Galway’s own Arts Centre has renovated Lady Gregory’s former city residence. Visitors to university’s Art Gallery must leave behind the Victorian, faux-Gothic of the Sheila Dickinson