Apart from our free public lecture at Cork Central Library, all lectures will take place in the conference room at Nano Nagle Place, Douglas St, T12 X70A, at 11:30am on the second Saturday of each month and we hope to see you there.

8 February 2025

Dr Matthew Whyte: ‘Siena in the Middle Ages: Tradition & Innovation in the Arts’

© The Cathedral of Siena

In March 2025, the National Gallery in London will open an exhibition exploring the breadth and wealth of visual art in fourteenth-century Siena. In anticipation of this event, this talk seeks to introduce some ways we can consider the character of Siena’s rich artistic tradition in these years. Defined by master painters such as Duccio, Simone Martini, and Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Sienese visual culture was one of simultaneous progress and retrospect, incorporating a new naturalism into the prevailing Gothic style, and blending a real world of emotion, movement, and space with the mystical setting of the Early Christian Byzantine icon. While famous for its painting, Siena in the 1300s was also a locus of sculptural innovation, particularly in the captivating design for the cathedral. Artists such as Giovanni Pisano pushed the expressive boundaries of the medium and illustrated the effect of Siena’s position as a vital trade route through the adoption of French Gothic technique into Italian principles. This talk brings together the most striking examples of Sienese art before the Black Death in 1348, conveying a city with a consciously distinct and captivatingly beautiful visual tradition.

Dr Matthew Whyte teaches and researches in the History of Art Department at University College Cork, where he is College of Arts, Celtic Studies and Social Sciences Excellence Scholar. He received his BA in History of Art and Philosophy from UCC, followed by an MRes in History of Art, specialising in Renaissance Italy and the work of  Michelangelo Buonarroti. He teaches across the undergraduate programme in History of Art, and is Coordinator of the Diploma in European Art History for the Centre for Adult Continuing Education. For the latter, he regularly offers public Short Courses on aspects of Italian art, leading field trips in Italy to support learning. Since 2018, Matthew has led both private and public tours for the Crawford Art Gallery in Cork. He works as an Art History Lecturer for Zegrahm Expeditions. Currently, Matthew’s research engages with cultural exchange in Renaissance Italy, examining the impact of 13th and 14th century sculpture on that of the High Renaissance.

1 March 2025 *(Please note, this has been changed from 8 March on the original schedule)

Mr Liam Lavery & Ms Eithne Ring, sculptors:
‘Crafting Stories; a 25 year collaborative journey of curiosity and creativity in public art’

(photo supplied by Lavery Ring)

Liam Lavery and Eithne Ring will give a talk about their work and their creative process focussing on some of their more significant projects.

The duo have been collaborating for over 25 years, with their primary practice cantered around public art, working in a wide variety of materials such as cast bronze and aluminium, enamelling, steel, glass, wood and most recently polymer modified plaster, Their work is site specific, delving into history, myths and geographical influences of each location,  transforming these elements by intricately  weaving a pattern of references into tangible artworks,  rich in context that resonates with their surroundings.

They have an extensive portfolio of public art projects around Ireland. Including Strongbow and Aoife; Waterford, The Lusitania Memorial sculpture; Old Head of Kinsale, Co Cork and “Tempus Fugit”, Viking Triangle Waterford

An Arts Council Agility Award in 2022  assisted in completing a series of linocut prints on the “Voyage of St Brendan the Navigator”, using a printing press that they built themselves.

12 April 2025

Ms Mary McCarthy, Director, Crawford Art Gallery:
‘The Future of Cork’s National Cultural Institution’

View of the Gallery Extension from Emmett Place by. Grafton Architects

Crawford Art Gallery is an Irish national cultural institution, dedicated to contemporary and historic visual art, located in a significant heritage building in the heart of Cork city. Offering a vibrant and dynamic programme of temporary exhibitions, it is also houses a collection of national importance which tells a compelling story of Cork and Ireland over the last three centuries.

Originally built in 1724 as the city’s Customs House, the Gallery is home to the famous Canova Casts, gifted to Cork two centuries ago. Featured in the gallery’s collection of over 3,000 objects are contemporary artists Aideen Barry, Gerard Byrne, Maud Cotter, Dorothy Cross, Tacita Dean, and Sean Scully as well as much-loved works by Irish artists James Barry, Harry Clarke, Mainie Jellett, Seán Keating, Daniel Maclise, Norah McGuinness, Edith Somerville, and Jack B. Yeats.

Mary McCarthy is the Director of Crawford Art Gallery one of Ireland’s National Cultural Institutions. She was appointed Director of the Crawford Art Gallery in 2018 and since then has worked with the Gallery team and the Board to advance a major capital redevelopment programme. As well as significantly developing the Gallery’s collection through acquisitions and donations.

A graduate of  English and Philosophy in UCC followed by a post-graduate degree in Arts Management in UCD Mary has worked in commercial galleries in New York and Dublin as well as at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA). Mary served as  Director of the National Sculpture Factory , Director of Programmes for Cork’s European Capital of Culture, the first Arts and Culture Manager at Dublin Docklands Development Authority as Chair of Culture Ireland, Ireland’s State agency for the promotion of Irish arts worldwide. She has also been a Board Member of IMMA and the Cork Film Festival. She has served on several European Commission working groups on culture, cities and cultural development, and has been an assessor for European Capital of Culture cities. Most recently, she sat on the Irish Government’s Taskforce on Arts and Culture Recovery during Covid times.

Mary is currently spearheading the ambitious redevelopment of  Crawford Art Gallery . The project, which is being funded by the Minister’s Department, has been designed by an interdisciplinary design team, led by award-winning Grafton Architects, and is being delivered by the Office of Public Works and Crawford Art Gallery.

10 May 2025

Ms Sarah Kelleher, Lecturer, MTU CCAD:
‘Sculpture in Transformation; Irish art since the 1980s’

‘Land’, Siobhan Hapaska, 1998 © Kerlin Gallery

The 1980s mark beginning of a distinct cultural shift in Irish art practice, when artists began to embrace new media techniques and to confront their audience with the presence of the artist’s body – advances that were largely pioneered by women. This tectonic shift, in the words of Alice Maher, opened up ‘a whole new field’ for art practice, one less hidebound by tradition and unburdened by the weight of the past.[1] Increasingly politicised by the Troubles in the North as well as the assertion and consolidation of conservative values  in the Republic, a generation of women turned to sculpture to engage with ideas of gender, identity, territory and marginality in process based works that prioritised a haptic or felt rather than simply optic materiality. This talk will focus on the material complexity and inventiveness that characterise ambitious sculptural practice in Ireland at the end of the 20th Century, foregrounding the ways in which an expanded approach to materials, motivated and informed by feminist politics, in turn activates an expanded set of spectatorial relations. Proceeding by means of case studies, this session will position a selection of sculptural objects and installations as potently oppositional, critical, and insistently material interventions within a historical and cultural moment preoccupied by transformation and national identity.

[1] Interview with Alice Maher, 14/03/18

Sarah Kelleher lectures in Art History at MTU Crawford College of Art and Design and is a Government of Ireland scholar, currently finishing her PhD on contemporary Irish sculpture with the History of Art Department in UCC. Her research focuses Irish art since the 1990s with an emphasis on sculptural practice, queer theory and phenomenology. As co-founder of Pluck Projects along with Dr. Rachel Warriner, Sarah has co-curated the exhibitions Rachel Fallon’s The Mother City project (2022); Padraig Spillane’s define silver lining v2.0 (2022); Jessica Akerman’s Cork Caryatids (2021)  and Alice Maher: Vox Materia (2018).  Pluck Projects are currently organising a series of symposia for the RHA in Dublin which consider the relation between Irish artists and the institution as the Academy celebrates  its 200th anniversary. Sarah also nurtures an independent curatorial practice and is the curator of Kevin Mooney: Revenants, IMMA 2022 and Taking Form: Students of the Year 1973-77 – Maud Cotter, Eilis O’Connell, Vivienne Roche at Lavit Gallery 2023

Previous talks

14 December 2024

Dr Angela Ryan, Department of French, UCC
‘Great Women Patrons of the Arts: Anna Maria Luisa de’ Medici, la Marquise de Pompadour and George Sand’

Anna Maria Luisa de’ Medici by Jan Frans van Douven Source: Wikipedia

Anna Maria Luisa de’ Medici, Electress Palatine and Duchess of Cleve (1667-1743), la Marquise de Pompadour (1721-1764) and George Sand (1804-1876) were important patrons of art and artists during their life, and left behind rich contributions to European art heritage. Vital as their role as supporter of artists and art was, they are still relatively under-recognised: as for many women of genius, report has sometimes attempted to trivialise their achievements. We owe a significant debt to their talent, taste and generosity. UNESCO says that half of the world’s art heritage is in Italy, and that half of that is in Florence: this cultural capital is the legacy of Anna Maria de’ Medici. Madame de Pompadour had an exceptional education for her time, and was a talented musician, who greatly influenced the artistic and decorative enrichment of Versailles during her twenty years there. Gorge Sand, a visual artist herself as well as a famous writer, acclaimed by critics and public alike, also gave great support to artists, and was instrumental in saving for us the exceptional 12^th century frescoes of the church of Vic.

Dr Angela Ryan BA (UCD) MèsL et DèsL (Bordeaux) DèsL (Sorbonne) Agrégée de l’Université MA Applied Psychology – Psychological Coaching (UCC). www.drangelaryan.com

9 November 2024

Ms Áine Andrews, practising painter and batik artist: ‘Mary Cassatt, a Radical American Impressionist in Paris’

Woman with a Pearl Necklace by Mary Cassatt, oil on canvas © Philadelphia Museum of Art

One of the so-called Trois Grandes Dames (‘the three great ladies’) of Impressionism, Mary Cassatt is France’s forgotten artist. One of only three women, she was also the only American, ever to join the French Impressionists.

This determined and inquisitive artist was a feminist and an influential intellectual personality of her time. Pivotal to the success of the Impressionist artists it was she who guided purchases of their works by rich American collectors, on condition that they promise to leave their treasures to museums.

Louisine Waldron Elder was still a teenager when Cassatt persuaded her to buy a pastel by Degas. At Cassatt’s urging she then borrowed pocket money from her sisters to purchase works by Monet and Pissarro. Later, Louisine and her husband, the sugar millionaire Henry Havemeyer, left their fabulous collection to the Metropolitan Museum in new York.

Even more importantly Cassatt supported the Parisian art collector Paul Durand-Ruel, after the financial crash in France in the 1880s, when he risked all by opening a gallery in New York. Durand-Ruel promoted her artwork and she introduced him to the buyers. Together they shaped a taste for Impressionism in the United States, making it one of the most famous movements in the history of art.

 

Áine Andrews is a practicing artist specialising in painting and batik.

Since 2017 she has been presenting a series of lectures on Art Appreciation. Based on the idea of a visit to an art gallery in Ireland or abroad she examines one painting in detail at each lecture. Together with her audience she explores the work itself, its historical context, as well as links to society of the time and the sometimes fascinating journey of the painting to its present location.

12 October 2024

The Morgan O’Driscoll Auctioneers Lecture

Claude Monet, Impression: Sunrise, 1872. Oil on canvas. Musée Marmottan, Paris

Mr William Gallagher, independent lecturer in Art History:
‘The Shock of the Old: Impressionism 150 years on.’

It is now a hundred and fifty years since the first exhibition of what quickly came to be called Impressionism. Today so popular and established as to represent a visual equivalent of ‘easy listening’, in 1874 its acceptance of the conditions of modern urban life came as a jolt and a threat to prevailing conventions of what represented Art. This talk looked at its emergence from nineteenth-century conflicts in art over ‘truth’ and Realism, tradition and rule, the raw and the finished, and at how its engagement with the clash of high and low values in art continues to resonate today.

William Gallagher is an independent lecturer in Art History. He taught at the Crawford College of Art in Cork, before moving to Donegal as Curator of the Glebe House and Gallery. He returned to Cork to work in UCC, running the two-year art history diploma preceding the establishment of degree programmes there. He has also given courses at both UCD and Trinity College in Dublin, and ran education programmes at the Royal Hibernian Academy.

11 September

Free Public Lecture, Central Library

Dr Michael Waldron, Crawford Art Gallery:
‘As they Must have Been: Reconsidering Seán Keating’s Men of the South (1921-22)’

Dr Michael Waldron is Curator of Collections & Special Projects at Crawford Art Gallery, Cork. His curatorial and research practice is informed by an interdisciplinary background in literature, art history, and Irish Studies. He has published articles on artists Antonio Canova, John Hogan, Samuel Forde, Patrick Hennessy, John Rainey, Sylvia Cooke-Collis, and writer Elizabeth Bowen. He has curated numerous exhibitions at Crawford Art Gallery, as well as Dublin Castle and The Glucksman, including Deep Maps, Recasting Canova, Harry Clarke Marginalia, and As They Must Have Been: Men of the South, 1922-2022. He is also a board member of Sample-Studios.