An Leabhar Aislingí (The Book of Visions): A Survey of the Artistic and Cultural Heritage of Ireland and Her Diaspora

Art has long served as a tool of cultural preservation while under colonial occupation, a means of survival for a shared identity through massive shifts in power, religion, and even geography. However, the contributions of Irish art and artists have been routinely left out of the art historical cannon, in no small part, due to the country’s occupied past and the shifting goal-posts of “whiteness”in 19th and 20th century America. This survey means to serve as one of the first bodies of work that examines, not only Irish artistic production from the earliest days of the island’s human inhabitants and medieval golden years, but through centuries of occupation, migration, and what it means to create art and maintain cultural identity in a diasporic community when the choice becomes one of identity or security.

Image citation: John Egan, Portable Harp, 1819, Wood, various materials. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY. The Crosby Brown Collection of Musical Instruments, 1889.