Yeats & the West says farewell to The Model, Sligo

May 20, 2016May 19, 2016 / thebicyclops / Leave a comment

Yeats & the West

an exhibition of western worlds

presented by NUI Galway

says farewell to

The Model, Sligo

yeatsandthewest.org

The exhibition turns south once again, en route to its reimagining at Thoor Ballylee.

W.B. Yeats always looked west. Yeats & the West discovers what it meant to him, and what this means for us.

Presented by NUI Galway, Yeats & the West featured at The Model, Sligo, and included an exciting programme of public talks, guided tours, and schools events.

Through crafts, collaborations, and landscapes Yeats & the West continues to try to tell an important story: a story of going west to find out who we really are.

Featuring crafts, collaborations, rare books, music, drama, video, and exclusive artwork, the exhibition turns south once again, en route to its reimagining at Thoor Ballylee.

With special thanks to Emer, Heike, Christian, Marie-Louise, Laura, and all who helped make it such a success. And most especially to our visitors.

Thanks for having us!

Yeats & the West Exhibition Talks & Tours

April 4, 2016April 6, 2016 / thebicyclops / Leave a comment

Yeats & the West Exhibition Tours & Talks
Thursdays 24 March – 12 May

Thursdays

Curators Tours 1pm. Public Talks 6pm.

Free entry

The Model, Sligo

J.M.Synge at The Playboy of the Western World dress rehearsal, by John Butler Yeats

Tours Thursday at 1pm

Tours of the exhibition from the curators take place every Thursday at 1pm. Find out what makes art and poetry so close, and observe the connection of books, and music, drama, and discover never before seen rare books and fine art from the collections of NUI Galway and The Model. Come and get an inside view of the crafts and cultures that made a western revolution.

Talks Thursdays at 6pm

This series of talks on Yeats’s connection to the west and beyond takes us inside the makings of a western cultural revolution. Talks from experts in the field range from exploring the pioneering art and craftwork of the Yeats family to W.B.Yeats’s own life and loves, considering his some of his most controversial and sexy poems; they reveal the extraordinary plays of his brother, the artist Jack B. Yeats, and alongside the Model Gallery’s newly unveiled Broadside collection, showcase his design and print work; and they weigh the wider forces that turned a cultural revolution into a real one.

Speakers include the curators of the exhibition Dr Adrian Paterson and Barry Houlihan (NUI Galway), Professor Adrian Frazier (NUI Galway), Professor Margaret Mills Harper (University of Limerick and outgoing Director of the Yeats International Summer School), Dr Hilary Pyle (former Yeats Curator at National Gallery of Ireland), Dr Ian Walsh (NUI Galway), Dr Mary Harris (NUI Galway).

All talks take place every Thursday at 6pm in the Model Theatre.

7 April – ‘Lake Isles, River Eyots: making Innisfree with the Yeats family’

Adrian Paterson, English, NUI Galway

14 April – ‘A Disturbing Influence: Maud Gonne in the life of W.B. Yeats’

Adrian Frazier, English, NUI Galway

21 April – ‘Jack B. Yeats’s A Broadside: a sheaf of ballads or a battery of guns?’

Hilary Pyle, former Yeats Curator at the National Gallery of Ireland

28 April – ‘W.B. Yeats and the Problem of Crazy Jane’

Margaret Mills Harper, University of Limerick, & outgoing Director of the Yeats International Summer School

5 May – ‘A Vaudeville of Frustration: The Theatre of Jack B. Yeats’.

Ian Walsh, Centre for Drama Theatre and Performance, NUI Galway

12 May – ‘Romanticism and Realism: Pearse, MacNeill, the Revival and the Rising’

Mary Harris, History, NUI Galway

For schools events Thursdays enquire schoolvisits@nuigalway.ie

The Model opening hours

Tues – Sat: 10am – 5.30pm

Thurs: 10am – 8pm

Sun: 12 – 5pm

Mon: Closed

Fergus Bourke: Hawthorn Tree, Connemara

Yeats & the West opens at The Model, Sligo

March 19, 2016March 18, 2016 / thebicyclops / Leave a comment

Yeats & the West

an exhibition of western worlds

featuring crafts, collaborations, rare books, music, drama, video, and exclusive art

presented by NUI Galway

Exhibition Opening

6pm Thursday 24 March

The Model, Sligo

W.B. Yeats always looked west. Yeats & the West discovers what it meant to him, and what this means for us.

yeatsandthewest.org

Yeats & the West opens at the Model, Sligo, featuring an exciting programme of public talks, guided tours, and schools events.

24 March to 12 May 2016 The Model, Sligo

Curators Tours Thursdays at 1pm. Public Talks Thursdays at 6pm

Open: Tue-Sat 10am-5.30pm

Thurs: 10am-8pm

Fri: 12am-5pm

Mon: Closed

Through crafts, collaborations, and landscapes Yeats & the West tells the story of going west to find out who we really are.

This exhibition comes to the Model from NUI Galway, and explores Yeats’s life, work, and legacy through his connections to the west. Rare artworks, books, manuscripts, and exclusive images, photographs, and film feature in an exhibition that reveals the impact of western heritage on W.B. Yeats and the wider Yeats family. Their commitment to crafts and culture created a western revolution that shaped modern Ireland.

“Yeats always looked west. For him the west of Ireland was the wellspring of songs, stories, and folklore, the foundation of the Irish imagination. It was the landscape of his poetry and plays. Significant events of his life took place here; collaborations that formed his work were forged here. This western outlook even took him and the Abbey Theatre players as far as the American west. Yeats & the West tells this remarkable story and considers what the west meant to him, and what that means for us”, explains Dr Adrian Paterson, a Lecturer in English at NUI Galway and scholar of W.B. Yeats, who led the curation of the exhibition.

Presented in association with NUI Galway, Yeats & the West features research input from the university’s Moore Institute for the Humanities, exclusive materials from the James Hardiman Library, from the National Library of Ireland, and from the Model’s own collections. The exhibition represents NUI Galway’s continuing contribution to the Decade of Commemorations and to Yeats2015, the worldwide series of cultural events marking the poet’s 150^th birthday.

yeatsandthewest.org

Yeats & the West comes to Sligo

March 16, 2016March 18, 2016 / thebicyclops / Leave a comment

Yeats & the West

an exhibition of western worlds

featuring crafts, collaborations, rare books, music, drama, video, and exclusive artwork

presented by NUI Galway

comes to

The Model, Sligo

yeatsandthewest.org

W.B. Yeats always looked west. Yeats & the West discovers what it meant to him, and what this means for us.

Presented by NUI Galway, Yeats & the West comes to the Model, Sligo, featuring an exciting programme of public talks, guided tours, and schools events.

24 March to 12 May 2016 The Model, Sligo

Curators Tours Thursdays at 1pm. Public Talks Thursdays at 6pm

Open: Tue-Sat 10am-5.30pm

Thurs: 10am-8pm

Fri: 12am-5pm

Mon: Closed

Through crafts, collaborations, and landscapes Yeats & the West tells the story of going west to find out who we really are.

This special exhibition for his 150th birthday runs 24 March to 12 May in the Model.

Take in the crafts and symbols that started the Irish Revival.

Learn more about the figures whose art and ideas shaped modern Ireland.

J.M.Synge at The Playboy of the Western World dress rehearsal, by John Butler Yeats

Through drama, film, rare books, manuscripts, artwork, crafts, and music, feel what it must have been like to a be a part of this cultural revolution.

Remembering this revolutionary year come and discover the collaborations that led to a real revolution.

Come and see how far west this revolution spread – even as far as Hollywood!

At the Model, Sligo, until 12 May 2016.

24 March to 12 May 2016

Open: Tue-Sat 10am-5.30pm

Thurs: 10am-8pm

Fri: 12am-5pm

Mon: Closed

Curators Tours Thursdays at 1pm. Public Talks Thursdays at 6pm

Exhibition Closing with Margaret Mills Harper & Crazy Jane

February 18, 2016March 21, 2016 / thebicyclops / Leave a comment

Fergus Bourke: Hawthorn Tree, Connemara

Exhibition Closing

with

Prof. Margaret Mills Harper

University of Limerick

‘Yeats & the Problem of Crazy Jane’

Monday 15 February 2016

Professor Margaret Mills Harper on Crazy Jane

To close the exhibition in Galway, Margaret Mills Harper gave a sparkling talk on philosophy, sex, censorship balladry, and poetics, including Cracked Mary, Crazy Jane, and a type of grass no one in the room admitted to having tried called ‘Warlock’. Introducing her exhibition curator Adrian Paterson thanked her for her scholarship and the energy she radiates whenever and wherever in the world talking about Yeats. He also warmly thanked his co-curator Barry Houlihan, and all the other contributors to the exhibition over a more than a year’s work.

Dr Adrian Paterson and Professor Margaret Mills Harper

Come and see us in Sligo! Opening at The Model, 24 March.

Margaret Mills Harper is Glucksman Professor of Contemporary Writing in English at the University of Limerick. She is the author of The Aristocracy of Art: Joyce and Wolfe (1990), and Wisdom of Two: The Spiritual and Literary Collaboration of George and W. B. Yeats ( 2006). She has co-edited two of the four volumes of Yeats’s “Vision” Papers (1992 and 2001) and both the 1925 and 1937 versions of Yeats’s A Vision (2008, 2015).

Crazy Jane and the Bishop

Bring me to the blasted oak
That I, midnight upon the stroke,
(All find safety in the tomb.)
May call down curses on his head
Because of my dear Jack that’s dead.
Coxcomb was the least he said:
The solid man and the coxcomb.

Nor was he Bishop when his ban
Banished Jack the Journeyman,
(All find safety in the tomb.)
Nor so much as parish priest,
Yet he, an old book in his fist,
Cried that we lived like beast and beast:
The solid man and the coxcomb.

The Bishop has a skin, God knows,
Wrinkled like the foot of a goose,
(All find safety in the tomb.)
Nor can he hide in holy black
The heron’s hunch upon his back,
But a birch-tree stood my Jack:
The solid man and the coxcomb.

Jack had my virginity,
And bids me to the oak, for he
(All find safety in the tomb.)
Wanders out into the night
And there is shelter under it,
But should that other come, I spit:
The solid man and the coxcomb.

from Words for Music Perhaps (1931)

Yeats & the West extended opening

February 8, 2016February 7, 2016 / thebicyclops / Leave a comment

Yeats & the West

an exhibition of western worlds

featuring crafts, collaborations, rare books, music, drama, video, and exclusive artwork

Hardiman Research Building, NUI Galway

now with extended opening

until Friday February 19th

yeatsandthewest.org

W.B. Yeats always looked west. Yeats & the West discovers what it meant to him, and what this means for us.

Through crafts, collaborations, and landscapes Yeats & the West tells the story of going west to find out who we really are.

This special exhibition for his 150th birthday now has extended opening until Friday 19th February 2016.

Take in the crafts and symbols that started the Irish Revival.

Learn more about the figures whose art and ideas shaped modern Ireland.

J.M.Synge at The Playboy of the Western World dress rehearsal, by John Butler Yeats

Through drama, film, rare books, manuscripts, artwork, crafts, and music, feel what it must have been like to a be a part of this cultural revolution.

Remembering this revolutionary year come and discover the collaborations that led to a real revolution.

Come and see how far west this revolution spread – even as far as Hollywood!

At the Hardiman Reseach Building, NUI Galway, until Friday February 19th 2016.

Western Worlds: a day at Yeats & the West

November 20, 2015November 23, 2015 / thebicyclops / Leave a comment

WESTERN WORLDS

a Yeats & the West day

Friday 27th November 2015

Hardiman Research Building, NUI Galway

William Butler Yeats, poet, playwright, politician, and Nobel prize-winner for literature, always looked west. The Yeats & the West exhibition at NUI Galway, with rare books, art, music, drama, and film, discovers what the west meant to him, and what this means for us. As part of the Yeats & the West programme, the day-long symposium Western Worlds tells the story of the western cultural revolution that shaped modern Ireland. Featuring talks on W.B.Yeats’s poems, plays, artistic collaborations and love affairs, and featuring his co-conspirators Jack B. Yeats, J.M. Synge, Padraic Pearse and Eva Gore Booth, it includes poetry readings and an exclusive interview with the artist John Behan about current exhibitions of Yeatsian-themed sculptures and drawings. Western Worlds tells a story of going west to find those places, real and imaginative, that change our sense of where and who we are.

yeats promo 2

Yeats & West Western Worlds2

Western Worlds: A Day at Yeats & the West

Bridge Seminar Room, Hardiman Research Building, NUI Galway

Friday 27th November 2015

10.45am Welcome & Kisses

Adrian Frazier Yeats & Maud Gonne: The Meaning of Their Kisses

12pm Poems

Brian Arkins W.B.Yeats & G.M. Hopkins

Deirdre Ní Chonghaile ‘Listening to this rude and beautiful poetry’: J.M. Synge as song collector in the Aran Islands

1pm Lunch

2pm Plays

Barry Houlihan ‘Suffering Spirits and Remorseful Dead’: Remembrance and Re-enactments in the plays of W.B. Yeats

Ian Walsh The Painted Play: Jack B. Yeats and the Postdramatic Theatre

3pm Revivals

Mary Harris Realism, Idealism and the Gaelic Revival

Maureen O’Connor Some Vague Utopia: Eva Gore-Booth’s The Death of Fionavar (1916)

4pm Coffee

4.30 Arts

Adrian Paterson with Barry Houlihan (curators of Yeats & the West) Yeats among the Arts: exhibition highlights tour

from 5pm in Special Collections

5.30pm Poems

David Clare & Deirdre Clare dramatic readings

6.30pm Reception

7pm Bulls

John Behan The Bull of Sheriff Street in conversation

yeatsandthewest.org

Western Worlds: a Yeats & the West symposium

November 19, 2015November 19, 2015 / thebicyclops / Leave a comment

WESTERN WORLDS

a Yeats & the West symposium

Friday 27th November 2015

Hardiman Research Building, NUI Galway

William Butler Yeats, poet, playwright, politician, and Nobel prize-winner for literature, always looked west. The Yeats & the West exhibition at NUI Galway, with rare books, art, music, drama, and film, considers what the west meant to him, and what this means for us. As part of the Yeats & the West programme, the day-long symposium Western Worlds tells the story of the western cultural revolution that shaped modern Ireland. Featuring talks on W.B.Yeats’s poems, plays, artistic collaborations and love affairs, and featuring his co-conspirators Jack B. Yeats, J.M. Synge, Padraic Pearse and Eva Gore Booth, it includes poetry readings and an exclusive interview with the artist John Behan about current exhibitions of Yeatsian-themed sculptures and drawings. Western Worlds tells a story of going west to find those places, real and imaginative, that change our sense of where and who we are.

yeats promo 2

Yeats & the West

October 31, 2015November 19, 2015 / thebicyclops / Leave a comment

Yeats & the West

an exhibition of western worlds

featuring crafts, collaborations, rare books, music, drama, video, and exclusive artwork

Hardiman Research Building, NUI Galway

until January

yeatsandthewest.org

Culture Night at Yeats & the West

September 15, 2015September 15, 2015 / thebicyclops / Leave a comment

Culture Night at Yeats & the West

Friday 18th September 5-9pm

Tours, talks, & more!

Free admission

Yeats & the West tells the story of the places and the people that made a western cultural revolution. Discover what the west meant to Yeats, and what this means to us.

Culture Night at Yeats & the West features extended opening hours until 9pm, free admission, and exclusive tours every hour on the hour at 5pm, 6pm, 7pm, and 8pm, by exhibition curators Adrian Paterson and Barry Houlihan.

It also features a new arrangement and rotation of items on display, and unique and personal access to material in special collections. Among many new selections specially on view for this week are:

A new selection of first editions: Yeats’s first book, The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems (1889), so admired by William Morris, and his book of symbolist stories set in Irish landscapes The Secret Rose (1897), illustrated by a spectacular Rosicrucian tree design in gilt and leather binding by Althea Gyles.

An entirely new display of Cuala Press books, all first editions, from W.B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, and Frank O’Connor, with illustrations by Elizabeth Rivers.

Poems about the Easter Rising by Dermot O’Byrne – actually the pseudonym of English composer Arnold Bax, whose tone poems based on Yeats’s poetry can be heard in the audio-visual part of the exhibition.

Collected Works of J.M. Synge edited by W.B. Yeats, and a deluxe edition of The Playboy of the Western World with colour illustrations by Sean Keating.

A new selection of exquisitely handcoloured Broadsides by Jack B. Yeats, Seamus O’Sullivan, and others, and a early book of Jack B. Yeats containing his early children’s theatre designs and even a pirate treasure map!

Also featuring as ever original artwork by Jack B. Yeats, Gerard Dillon, Fergus Bourke and Nicholas Feve. Manuscripts, rare books, music, video, and exclusive archival material from Belfast’s Lyric Theatre, the Abbey Theatre, and even the American west.

In this decade of commemorations come and find out more about the man who shaped and commented on the whole revolutionary decade. Discover the collaborations and collisions that formed modern Ireland, and deepened our culture.

All this at Yeats & the West. The exhibition runs until December.