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Extra.ie
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Extra.ie
Fetsival-goers descend to Kilmainham for Forbidden Fruit
It's day two of Forbidden Fruit festival, which is taking place on the grounds of the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Royal Hospital Kilmainham. Gates opened at 2pm, with last entry at 9.30pm — and tickets are still available to purchase via Ticketmaster if you're looking for something to fill up your Bank Holiday Sunday. Attendees are reminded that only bags A4-size and smaller are permitted into the concert site, and they are subject to security checks on entry. Pic: Sasko Lazarov / © Pic: Sasko Lazarov / © Pic: Sasko Lazarov / © Pic: Sasko Lazarov / © The festival is now in its 11th year, with Saturday festival-goers seeing performances from Caribou, Mall Grab, Glass Beams, Effy and more. Sunday will see Dublin singer Jazzy take to the stage, as well as the iconic Underworld. Pic: Sasko Lazarov / © Pic: Sasko Lazarov / © Pic: Sasko Lazarov / © Pic: Sasko Lazarov / © South Korean DJ and singer-songwriter Peggy Gou also headlines on the second day of the festival which will be completely finished by 10.45pm. For those looking to party the night away following Forbidden Fruit there is plenty of activity happening in Dublin City Centre. Forbidden Fruit have urged all attendees that Kilmainham is a residential area, and 'respect the local community.' Organisers advise people to plan their journey home via Irish Rail; Dublin Bus or the Luas.
Irish Examiner
19-05-2025
- General
- Irish Examiner
IMMA Dublin: Fascinating patchwork of social history behind American quilts exhibition
Louisiana P Bendolph and Rita Mae Pettway may not be household names, but their extraordinary quilts have been exhibited in museums all over the world, and are now having their first showing in Ireland at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Kilmainham, Dublin. The exhibition, Kith & Kin: The Quilts of Gee's Bend, is jointly organised by IMMA and Souls Grown Deep, a non-profit established to preserve, document and promote the artistic legacies of black American artists based in the Southern United States. Many of the organisation's activities centre on the quiltmakers of Gee's Bend, a small farming community in rural Alabama. 'Gee's Bend is positioned in a U-shaped curve in the middle of the Alabama river,' says Raina Lampkins-Fielder, Souls Grown Deep's chief curator. 'What's interesting is that this geographically isolated black community of around 700 people has remained in a certain way intact since their ancestors were forcibly brought there in the early 1800s. 'In that time, Gee's Bend has produced over five generations of quiltmakers. They've been producing work as far back as the mid 19th century, and maybe longer, and they continue to transmit that artistic knowledge and their skills from mother to daughter, from aunt to niece, and from one neighbour to another.' The first black families to settle in Gee's Bend were slaves on the 6,000-acre Joseph Gee plantation, which eventually passed to the Sheriff of Halifax County, Mark H Pettway. After President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed the emancipation of slaves in 1863, most of the families stayed on the land as sharecroppers, or tenant farmers. 'This makes Gee's Bend quite unique,' says Lampkins-Felder. 'Folks in the Bend didn't necessarily have to participate in the great migration of black people from the south to the north for opportunities or to escape Jim Crow oppression.' In the 1930s, President Franklin D Roosevelt introduced the New Deal socio-economic programme, in response to the Great Depression. 'Gee's Bend was one of those places that benefited. Part of the New Deal involved the building of new houses. In Gee's Bend, you got a small cabin. It didn't have all the mod cons we expect today, but living standards certainly improved. There was no running water or plumbing or heat or electricity, but still, it was a little bit better, and being able to purchase those homes was incredibly important.' One of the pieces in Kith & Kin: The Quilts of Gee's Bend. The New Deal also encouraged the tenant farmers to buy plots of land in the old Pettway plantation. 'You'll hear that surname, Pettway, a lot with the quiltmakers in Gee's Bend. It doesn't necessarily mean that there's any blood relation. It's just that legacy of slavery, of taking the name of the enslaver.' The lack of heating in the New Deal cabins was largely what inspired the women to continue making quilts. 'Even though it's Alabama,' says Lampkins-Fielder, 'the winters are bitterly cold. It's hot during the day, it's like the desert climate in that respect, but it's really, really cold at night. And so they kept making quilts to keep warm. But in the Bend, you know, there wasn't a lot of extra material around. Even to this day, there's not a post office, or any store at all. 'But one could recycle material. Worn out school clothes or dress shirts or work clothes. Flour or sugar or feed sacks. All of these, when they were no longer useful, were recycled for the quilts. So this whole notion of the patchwork quilt really comes out of those times of scarcity and resourcefulness. There was this incredibly inventive salvaging.' It was the practice for the women to air their quilts outdoors in the autumn. 'And this was an opportunity for folks to see what you'd been up to. The quilts were draped over clothes lines, wood piles and porches, like this massive plein air gallery.' The quilts got a wider airing from 1966, when 60 quilters from Gee's Bend and its environs formed the Quilters Freedom Bee, a co-operative that marketed their creations to department stores such as Sear's and Bloomingdale's. Thereafter, the art world began taking notice. The abstract painter Lee Krasner was a vocal champion, calling the quilts 'magnificent' and investing in several for her own collection. In 2002, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas, mounted a ground-breaking exhibition, The Quilts of Gee's Bend, which toured to the Whitney Museum of Fine Art in New York. Leola Pettway and Qunnie Pettway working on quilts at Gee's Bend, Alabama. 'That was when I got acquainted with Gee's Bend,' says Lampkins-Fielder. 'That was really the watershed moment for me. I was an associate director of the Whitney Museum, and I worked with Max Anderson, who's now the president of Souls Burn Deep.' Reviewers compared the Gee's Bend quilts to the paintings of the Abstract Expressionists Barnett Newman and Frank Stella, and their artistic forebears, Paul Klee and Henri Matisse. In the New York Times, Michael Kimmelman declared them 'eye-poppingly gorgeous' and 'some of the most miraculous works of modern art America has produced,' high praise indeed when one considers that textiles were still considered a craft by many critics. Years later, Lampkins-Fielder moved to Paris, France to work with the Mona Bismarck American Centre of Art and Culture. 'We were trying to do something a little bit different around how people can approach art,' she says. "And then, when the opportunity to work with Souls Grown Deep came up, I thought, well, this is absolutely amazing. I wondered if my being based in Paris would be problematic, but no, strangely, my being here works really well. I had a long career in the States, so I still have connections to the art world there. "And then, being based in Paris, I can open doors to Europe in a way that if I were based in the States, I really wouldn't have that access and that facility of movement.' Lampkins-Fielder estimates that Souls Grown Deep has invested almost a million dollars in the Gee's Bend community over the past four or five years. 'I love being an advocate for these artists,' she says, 'helping their voices to be projected more broadly and become more widely known. But we still have so much to do. Their work should really speak for itself, you know.' Kith & Kin: The Quilts of Gee's Bend runs at IMMA until October 27 Further information:
Irish Times
03-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Irish artist Michael Kane: ‘Patrick Kavanagh did nothing else but create art. And that was my ideal'
Can art change the world? Are art centres and galleries about leisure or life? For Michael Kane the answer is definitely the latter. The artist once described in these pages as truculent and combative – at least back in the 1960s and 1970s – is these days a charming combination of formidably intelligent, intense and serious yet frequently mischievous. He is also quick to see the absurdities of some previous certainties. Maybe he has mellowed. Maybe it's just a function of living a long and well-considered life. Marking his 90th birthday with a solo show at the Taylor Galleries in Dublin, and with works in exhibitions at the Irish Museum of Modern Art and at Hillsboro Fine Art , Kane is an artist, writer, poet, editor and firm believer in the idea that art truly matters. He lives fully surrounded by it. We are sitting in the kitchen of the Dublin mews house he shares with wife, the architect Shelley McNamara , fuelled by tea and cake, and darting through time in a conversation that takes in architecture, politics, sport, poetry and literature, but always returns to art. READ MORE Kane's own art fills the walls in a glorious extravaganza of colour, figures and dancing abstractions that always appear to be on the cusp of reminding you of something known or heartfelt. Farther back, towards the rear of the house, a landing leads to his first-floor studio, which McNamara – principal with Yvonne Farrell of the award-winning Grafton Architects – designed. It is home to a collection of African sculptures and to pieces by James McKenna, his late friend and fellow artist. Behind Kane is Hard Man, a large painting from 2012 that's tricky to tear your eye from. In it a figure emerges in sporting strip against a blocked background of reds, blues and greens. Some is collaged with newspaper; a page from a painted-over calendar shows, upside down, the year 2011. And yet, for all that, the figure could easily be a Celtic warrior from deep in mythological time. The artist Michael Kane in his Dublin studio. Photo: Bryan O'Brien The idea emerges that, civilised as we may imagine ourselves to be, we all have our impulses to battle, that organised sport is just another mode of warfare, and maybe that all times continue to meet and coalesce in the present. This layering of times, ideas, memories and histories is one reason why Kane's abstractions are so powerful. Another is that they are hard-won drillings down into the essence of things, rather than the aesthetic promptings of idle imaginings. History, poetry, philosophy, architecture and cultural memory all make their way in. One gets the sense that not much goes unnoticed by his incisive mind. Michael Kane in his Dublin studio. Photograph: Bryan O'Brien Michael Kane's Dublin studio. Photograph: Bryan O'Brien Dublin is as rich a source of inspiration for Kane as it was for James Joyce . In many ways the artist's new body of work is as thorough an examination of the city as it was for Joyce in Ulysses. Born on Haddington Road, Kane lived with his aunt and her family on Pembroke Road. 'I have always lived within striking distance of this area. I have tried to describe that as it was,' Kane says. Emerging through many of his paintings, Dublin is what happens away from the major streets. 'There's a greater memory in a lane behind Fitzwilliam Street than on Fitzwilliam Street itself. And a lot of the kind of abstracted paintings that I've been doing in recent years are a result of walking around those lanes over the years. It is the ghost: the ghost city that is behind the actual city,' he says. When Kane smiles the austere lines of his face melt to an unexpected warmth. He smiles as he remembers Patrick Kavanagh walking those same streets and canal-bank paths, and how he became familiar with Kavanagh as a person before he came to understand him as a poet. Kane also credits the poet with building his idea of what an artist could and should be: 'This was a man, as far as I was concerned, who did nothing else but create art. And that was my ideal. I couldn't abide amateurism, and so he was the ideal symbol of what an artist ought to be.' Later Kane says, 'I remember a magazine that had a selection of his poems in it, and it had the effect of establishing beyond doubt my feeling about his artistic significance. I never looked back after that. And I never ceased to admire him as a person.' Kane's 90 years has been peppered with people, admirable and otherwise, and he is gifted with – or cursed by – a phenomenally powerful memory, the contents of which he relays in detail in his 2023 memoir, Blind Dogs , the title of which is from a Kavanagh poem. [ Blind Dogs by Michael Kane: Immersive writing carried along by the facility of memoir Opens in new window ] There is the singer Ronnie Drew , whom the artist met while the pair were working night shifts at the telephone exchange. The way Kane tells it, nights at the telephone exchange were populated by an intriguing cast of characters biding time and making ends meet while waiting to become something else. Mostly controlled by those in charge, they always seemed on the brink of anarchy. We also meet the poet, arts activist, biographer, commentator, critic, editor, barrister and admired friend Anthony Cronin , as well as Brendan Behan , Colm Ó Briain , Charles Cullen , John Behan , Seán Keating , Eithne Jordan and those who populated Dublin's pubs, talking out their ideas and dreams over pints or, in Kane's case, driven by the urge to do something, to make something happen in the world. He set up and edited the influential magazine Structure and was a member of the Independent Artists Group, created as an alternative to the Royal Hibernian Academy and the Living Art exhibition. 'We were ambitious not just for our individual selves,' Kane writes in Blind Dogs, 'but for art itself. We saw the poor state of painting and sculpture in the Living Art exhibition and the annual show by the RHA. There was a drab inertia in both.' But all that was to come later. First Kane went to art college, surprised, he says, to have been offered a place, and more surprised still to have one of the tutors praise his work. 'I was in my early 20s, and that was the first person who ever praised anything I did. It was of tremendous significance to me.' He was an admirer of the painters Piero della Francesca and Paul Cézanne , whose work he came across in 'little colour reproductions, in small books that were available for something like a half crown in the 1950s. They had an extraordinary effect on me'. 'Then,' he says, 'when I first saw the originals of Cézanne, it gave me an immense positive shock, because of the struggle that I could see him making, which corresponded to the awful struggles that one puts into one's own work.' Struggle and hard work matter. 'Perfection is appalling,' Kane says. 'It's a dead hand.' He describes artists working in the Muslim tradition being 'expected to put in mistakes, because only God is perfect'. Michael Kane in his Dublin studio. Photograph: Bryan O'Brien Hand in hand with Kane's respect for hard work and struggle comes his dismissal of the contemporary cult of the individual genius. Many people are immensely talented, and many of those never do the work to realise that talent, but, for Kane, artists can flourish only through artistic movements. 'We don't like movements in Ireland for some reason,' he says, and yet it was a movement that gave rise to the Abbey Theatre , the oldest national theatre in the English-speaking world. It was also a movement – this one established by Kane and his peers – that created Project Arts Centre , in Dublin, one of the very first to incorporate space for all art forms under one extraordinary roof. 'Movements,' Kane says, 'produce great individuals, not the other way around.' Moving through to Kane's studio, the floor is spattered with paint like a Jackson Pollock; framed woodcut prints line one wall at floor level, propped up against other larger canvases, while smaller works on paper pile a table. These will form the substance of Kane's upcoming solo show. Their smaller size comes in part of necessity. The artist spent part of 2024 in ill health; he wondered if he would work again. Sitting down at a table instead of standing to face his canvases, he painted, he says, to see what would come. There's something delicious about seeing art in all the chaotic glory of its making, before it becomes more coldly final on a gallery wall. Maybe this is its last chance to be truly itself. Here there are familiar elements from Kane's work over the years: faces made manifest in a few sure strokes, collaged newspapers, hints of architecture, nudes, some sex here and there, and horses. One horse, in particular, in bold red, reminds how Picasso could get a dog out of a single line. Here the almost crude crimson brushstrokes are pure horse power. Kane might be amused by the idea of walking all over a Pollock as he goes about his business of being an artist. He is scathing about 'the colonisation process engineered by the US state department', alluding to the CIA-backed project of using art and culture in general, and abstract expressionism in particular, as a propaganda tool in postwar Europe. It was a project, he writes 'that eventually retarded the development of the works of numerous British artists at the time, and has now colonised the world'. To further embitter the pill, money followed, to further colonise how art is made and understood. Michael Kane in his Dublin studio. Photograph: Bryan O'Brien This matters because, for Kane, art has meaning when it is a distillation of the stories, legacies and psychologies of a culture, rather than a second-hand reflection of well-packaged imports. Describing the early days of Project, he says: 'It seemed to me that the excitement aroused was due to the fact that young artists could be avant-garde, progressive and articulate in their formulations, and could site their work firmly in their own place and time, rejecting the tendency to tack it on to the tail end of Anglo-American taste and practice.' He also describes 'that component of surrealism that sets out to reduce the whole of art to a sly and shallow joke [that] appeals to the infantile mentality of the media and its public, to governments and the rich, because it offers no challenges, either philosophical or political, no comment but a subservient sneer delivered out of the corner of the mouth, denoting its origin in failure'. Kane is quick to call out hypocrisy, laziness and the vacuity of art for money's sake. But he is also a romantic, in that he believes in redemption, truth and love. Aware that part of the human condition is to live between the impulses that underlie both these sets of tendencies, he is also vitally committed to the daily task of getting up and continuing to try to do it again, better. Maybe these are the essential ingredients for any halfway decent abstract art. Kane's work is all that, and more. Michael Kane's work features in The 1980s: A Return to Painting, at Hillsboro Fine Art , Dublin, until May 30th, and in Staying with the Trouble, at the Irish Museum of Modern Art , Dublin, until September 21st. Michael Kane: Works on Paper is at Taylor Galleries , Dublin, from May 23rd until June 14th
Irish Examiner
29-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Examiner
Orla Comerford getting her sprint career down to a fine art after Paris
Orla Comerford was a couple of days removed from her Paralympic 100m T13 bronze medal at the Stade de France when she made a beeline for the summer's second major goal. This one would take a lot longer than 11.94 seconds. If she is married to athletics in the public mind after three successive Games then art is her other love. The Dubliner has a degree in Fine Art Media from the National College of Art & Design (NCAD) and works part-time in the Irish Museum of Modern Art. Sportspeople may travel the world but it's not like they get to take in a lot of it beyond hotels and stadiums. Comerford is no different, but the promise was made that, whatever happened on track, she would take in the Musée d'Orsay. The Left Bank gem is a treasure trove of French art dating from the mid-19th century through to the outbreak of the Great War. Impressionist and post-impressionist work in particular. You can hardly turn around without staring into a Degas, a Renoir or a van Gogh. Comerford was drawn especially to Edouard Manet, the father of Impressionism, and his 'Olympia' and 'Le Déjeuner Sur l'Herbe' paintings that stand as foundation stones for the entire movement. Claude Monet was another on the 'must-see' list. 'These were some of the pieces that I studied in school and inspired me to go to college and that now inspire me to share that passion for modern art with other people in the museum. That actually felt quite emotional. 'It felt like my time on the track had come full circle with that performance and then to follow it up by going into a space like that and thinking, 'oh my god, I'm here' and these pieces are the reason I'm here.' Orla will work with Allianz to support initiatives that promote para sport, inclusion and youth engagement – including the Allianz NextGen programme, which aims to inspire young people with disabilities to participate in sport and pursue their athletic dreams. Pic: ©INPHO/Dan Sheridan. When she was done, Comerford bought some postcards in the museum shop with some of her favourite pieces on the front and sent them back to Sarah Fynes, the art teacher who had lit that fire in her years before. 'It was to say to her, 'I'm here, I made it'. That was really special.' These twin passions dovetail nicely. Her role in the museum is a mental space away from the world of athletics. The hope is that she can focus on more of her own work in the years to come but there is already comfort in the fact that the arts will be there in some form when the day comes to hang up the spikes. That won't be today or tomorrow. The initial emotion when crossing the finishing line in Saint-Denis last September was one of disappointment. A gold medal and a world record had been the goals. Neither had been claimed. The two women ahead of her had both bettered that standing record but the main, and instant, salve to her emotional wound was the gaggle of 'Team Orla' family and friends waiting to acclaim her on the home straight. Getting that close has only hardened the desire to go the extra mile, or millimetre. 'It almost makes me hungrier. You've pushed everything and you haven't quite got what you wanted. You're still delighted and appreciate how far you have come. Some athletes look at another four years as a daunting thing. I just couldn't be more excited. 'The last cycle, it was just three years after Tokyo, and it was all a bit disjointed. I had injury hanging over and I just feel like I've come into this four years in a really good position and feeling really positive. I'm more ambitious than ever, I can allow myself to dream bigger.' Those injuries bear repeating. Major surgery in 2019 filtered through to Tokyo in 2021. She sat out the entirety of 2022. Her 2023 season was a breeze by comparison but still pockmarked with enough fitness issues to count as a disaster for anyone else. By the time Paris rolled around in 2024 she was still probably running with what she terms 'a bit of caution', but any remaining clouds seem to have cleared and 2025 has swept in as something of a clean slate. Mentally and physically. There was no rush to get back after the Paralympics. The Para Athletic World Championships in New Delhi don't start until September, although she was still far enough progressed in training to dominate a mixed ability 60m race in the European Indoors in March when given just four weeks' notice. That meet in Apeldoorn was fruitful in other ways. It was the first time she competed at that level under the eye of new coach Daniel Kilgallon. That allowed them to work each other out in a high-profile environment before the Worlds. Kilgallon's Tallaght-based group is a high-achieving collective that Comerford feels can drive her on again. National 60m champion Sarah Leahy is just one example of an athlete who blends talent with a raw work ethic. That can only be good. The LA Games in 2028, and another shot at gold, are the long-term goal. 'You have to shoot for the stars and if you land on the moon then that's great as well. You have to think big and dream big in terms of how you motivate your day-to-day. It has to push you in what you're doing and in Paris my goal was a gold and a world record. 'There is really strong competition in my classification and event at the moment so I know everyone is looking to go faster and push each other, but I can't get caught up in times and positions. The motivation is in the process.' One brushstroke at a time. Orla Comerford has been announced as a new brand ambassador for Allianz
