IMMA | SELF-DETERMINATION

SELF-DETERMINATION: A Global Perspective

30 November 2023 – 21 April 2024

Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin

Crawford Art Gallery is delighted to loan ten works from the Collection to the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) for this major exhibition.

SELF-DETERMINATION: A Global Perspectiveis one of the largest exhibitions in IMMA’s history. The culmination of a three-year research project, this exhibition focuses on the nation-states that emerged in the wake of the First World War, exploring the role of art and artists in relation to the expression of national identities, nation-building, and statecraft. 

The exhibition brings together a range of Irish and international works, both modern and contemporary, that illuminate the shared experiences of the new states. 

In 1919, Arthur Griffith, writing from Gloucester Prison, urged his colleagues to ‘mobilise the poets’ to help make Ireland’s case for independence on the international stage. Griffith’s letter acknowledges the role of art and culture in developing international solidarities and justifying Ireland’s right, among other small nations, to ‘self-determine’. It also highlights the new possibilities for artists in the early twentieth century, an era of collapsing empires and seismic geopolitical shifts, to articulate and enact radical modern and democratic principles.

Each of the new states produced its own cultural complexities, with its own traditions, histories, and industries to be reimagined in line with the new imperatives of modernity. The exhibition explores common strategies and methodologies developed by artists, cultural practitioners, and others invested in the formation of a new state in the first half of the twentieth century.  

SELF-DETERMINATION: A Global Perspective is supported by the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media under the Decade of Centenaries Programme 2012–2023.

Crawford Art Gallery wishes to thank and congratulate Annie Fletcher, Seán Kissane, Nathan O’Donnell, Georgie Thompson, and the IMMA team.

Featured artworks:

• James Archer, Casket, c.1930.
• Hugh C. Charde, Portrait of Terence MacSwiney, Lord Mayor of Cork, 1920.
• Margaret Clarke, The Dressmaker, 1924.
• Grace Henry, Claddagh Market, Galway, 1916-18.
• Paul Henry, Landscape, c.1925.
• Seán Keating, Men of the South, 1921-22.
• Edith Somerville, A Holy Place of the Druids or Grave of a Chieftain, undated.
• Mary Swanzy, Samoan Scene, 1924.
• Jack B. Yeats, Off the Donegal Coast, 1922.

Jack B. Yeats, A Race in Hy Brazil, 1937.

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