New Histories of Irish Art and Modernism: S.B. Kennedy Conference

In 1991, the curator and art historian S.B. Kennedy published his seminal volume Irish Art & Modernism, 1880-1950. This was the first major text to survey the relationship between modern Irish artists and their European counterparts, tracing the impact of a collection of aesthetic preoccupations loosely termed “modernism” within Ireland. Kennedy’s volume examined themes central to the study of Irish art: the relationship between the local and the transnational in Irish artistic movements; the mobility of aesthetic influences across geographies, institutions, and art networks; the existence, or otherwise, of an “Irish school”; and the tensions between modernity, the nation, and the past in formulations of Irish identity.

In the thirty years since the publication of Kennedy’s text, the field of modernist studies has undergone rapid transformation. Historians of modernism have conclusively challenged the notion of a single, hegemonic modernist tradition while dismantling many of the implied hierarchies of the field. Most notably, investigations of modernism have been fruitfully expanded by the application of urgent methodological lenses, including the critical perspectives of postcolonial, queer, ecocritical, feminist, and diasporic studies. How have such viewpoints impacted the study of Irish modernism? What work is still to be done?

Honoring S.B. Kennedy’s career as both an art historian and a long-time curator at the Ulster Museum, this conference examines modernism in the Irish visual arts from 1880 to the present day. Who were the audiences, protagonists, allies, and antagonists of modern art in Ireland? How did Irish art across the island—north and south, east and west—champion modernism in the arts, broadly construed, across shifting political and economic milieus? And what new narratives of Irish modern art might be written by considering decolonial, gendered, and intersectional perspectives?

* The schedule is subject to change. Please see the for most up-to-date information.

Belfast Room, Ulster Museum

10:00 Registration & Coffee Reception

10:30 Welcome

10:40 Panel I: Defining Modernism, Part I

• Dr. Fintan Cullen (University of Nottingham)—“Modernism, Whistler, and Irishness”
• Dr. Hannah Baker (Trinity College Dublin)—“Sarah Cecilia Harrison (1863-1941): A Traditionalist in Modern Ireland”
• Dr. Judith Stapleton (University of Notre Dame)—“‘Among the Radicals’: Staging Irish Modernism at Home and Abroad, William Orpen, 1910-1914”

12:00 Break

12:30 Panel II: Defining Modernism, Part II

• Dr. Gavin Murphy (Atlantic Technological University)—“Unfinished Business: Jack B. Yeats, Modernity and the Avant-Garde”
• Dr. Niamh NicGhabhann Coleman (University of Limerick)—“Catholic Modernism in Ireland: Perspective and Interpretations”

13:30 Lunch

14:30 Panel III: Spheres of Influence

• Katie Buckley (Prints & Drawings, National Gallery of Ireland)—“The Student Surpassing the Master? William Orpen and his Students at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art (1902-1914)”
• Dr. Michael Waldron (Crawford Art Gallery)—“‘She gave them of her best’: Tracing Mainie Jellett’s Sphere of Influence”
• Sarah McAuliffe (National Gallery of Ireland)—“An [In]soluble Puzzle: creating and interpreting a vision of Ireland, 1920–1950”

16:00 Tour of the Collection

• Anne Stewart, Senior Curator of Art, Ulster Museum.
  By registration only

17:00 Keynote (Lecture Theatre, Ulster Museum)

In Conversation:

• Dr. Riann Coulter, Curator F.E. McWilliam Gallery and Visiting Professor, Belfast School of Art
• Dr. Fionna Barber, Reader in Art History, Manchester School of Art
• Dr. Róisín Kennedy, Associate Professor of the School of Art and Cultural Policy, University College Dublin

Respondent: Dr. Joseph McBrinn, Reader in Art and Design History at Belfast School of Art of the University of Ulster

18:30 Reception (Belfast Room, Ulster Museum)

• Book Launch: (2025) edited by Fionna Barber and Fintan Cullen

Canada Room and Council Chamber, Queen's University Belfast

9:30 Registration & Coffee Reception

10:00 Panel IV: Paper Modernisms

• Marie Lynch (Centre for the Study of Irish Art, National Gallery of Ireland)—“A Pixie in Irish Art: Pamela Colman Smith and the Yeats Family”
• Chiara Harrison Lambe (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)—“‘My Own Work Made Me Happier': Stella Steyn, James Joyce, and the Boundaries of Irish Modernism”
• Dr. Angela Griffith (Trinity College Dublin)—“Blurred lines: Irish Artists and Modern Illustration: Tradition and Innovation”

11:30 Break

12:00 Panel V: Exhibiting Ireland

• Dr. Billy Shortall (Trinity College Dublin)—“Irish Visual Art and Artifice in the Early Years of the Irish Free State”
• Dr. Philip McEvansoneya (Trinity College Dublin)—“‘Cultural Expression in Time of War’: Seeing Modern Continental Art in Emergency Ireland”
• Dr. Elisabeth Ansel (University of Jena)—“The Story of an Unknown Exhibition: Jack B. Yeats and Irish Modernism in Germany"

13:30 Lunch

14:30 Panel VI: Queer Visibilities and Geographies of Exchange

• Seán Kissane (Irish Museum of Modern Art)—“Revisiting The White Stags”
• Dr. Edwin Coomasaru (Independent Scholar)—“(Anti-)Colonial Ecologies between Northern Ireland and Sri Lanka: Song of Ceylon (1935) at the Ulster Museum”
• Dr. Cai Lyons (Independent Art Historian)—“Mary Swanzy’s Exhibiting Practice as Transnational Modernist Exchange, c. 1900-1947”

16:00 Break

16:30 Panel VII: Irish Modernisms Now?: Contemporary Perspectives

• Dr. Kate Antosik-Parsons (Trinity College Dublin)—“Disruptive Encounters: Protest, Performance and Politics in Array Collective’s The Druthaib’s Ball (2021)”
• Dr. Joseph McBrinn (Belfast School of Art of the University of Ulster)—Respondent Remarks: “Thinking through Irish Art and Modernism”

17:30 Closing Remarks

Info: Please see agenda below

Info: Dr. Riann Coulter (Curator, F.E. McWilliam Gallery and Visiting Professor, Belfast School of Art), Dr. Fionna Barber (Reader in Art History, Manchester School of Art) and Dr. Róisín Kennedy (Associate Professor of the School of Art and Cultural Policy, University College Dublin) in conversation with Dr. Joseph McBrinn (Reader in Art and Design History, Belfast School of Art of the University of Ulster)

Info: Launch of "The Routledge Companion to Irish Art" (2025) edited by Dr. Fionna Barber and Dr. Fintan Cullen

Info: Please see agenda below

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