News Release
Leading Irish Arts Innovator Joins UU
Declan McGonagle, one of the leading figures in the development of international contemporary art, has joined the University of Ulster as Director of Interface, a £9m cultural initiative that aims to have art and design play a significant role in community development in Belfast and the rest of Northern Ireland.
Interface - the Centre for Research in Art, Technologies and Design - is funded by the Department of Employment and Learning and the Atlantic Philanthropies Foundation under the SPUR II initiative. It is also a key element in a multi-million pound redevelopment and upgrade programme under way at the University’s Belfast campus.
Professor McGonagle, who has been appointed to a Chair in Art and Design, is an
acclaimed innovative curator and festival director and an experienced judge at major European visual art competitions and awards.The founding Director of the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) at Kilmainham, Dublin, he has been a nominee for the Turner Prize, Britain’s major arts accolade, and a member of the Turner Prize jury.
Recruitment is currently under way for 14 posts at the centre, which is based at the School of Art and Design, on the Belfast campus. Additional positions will become available in 2005.
"Interface builds on the strengths already present in the research areas in the University of Ulster," he said. "It is a unique project and presents a singular opportunity within third-level art education for artists to reach out to the society in which they live."
Professor McGonagle was nominated for the Turner in 1987 while director of Derry’s Orchard Gallery. The citation praised his role in making the gallery and the city an international centre for the artist. He served on the Turner Prize jury in 1993.
Among the world names whose works he exhibited in Derry were Antony Gormley, respected for public sculptures that include the Angel of the North in Gateshead; acclaimed painters Richard Hamilton, Leon Golub and Nancy Spero.
Throughout his career, Professor McGonagle has been renowned for developing high quality visual arts policies which also focus on community involvement and experience.
Interface will use radical new approaches in art and design technology as part of a process that seeks to bring communities together and to signpost ways in which divided communities elsewhere can start to communicate."Great art is about communication as well as self-expression. We will be engaged in doing research into new ways of working, opening up new avenues of how to link artwork, fine art, design and modern technology and connecting them at many different levels to the community, industry and the economy," Professor McGonagle said
.He graduated from the Belfast College of Art in 1976 and was appointed founding Organiser of Derry City Council’s Orchard Gallery. Having established his home city in the consciousness of the art world, he was appointed Director of Exhibitions at the ICA, London in 1984 until 1986 when he returned to the city in order to expand the Orchard Gallery and develop new public art, education and community access programmes.
As the first IMMA Director in 1990, he established a world reputation for the extensive galleries, situated in palatial surroundings of the Royal Hospital building on Dublin’s western fringes, and spearheaded its mission as Ireland’s first national institution concerned with the collection and programming of modern and contemporary visual art.
He won praise for establishing significant collections, curtain its diverse permanent and temporary international exhibitions and instituting award-winning education and community-outreach programmes.
After 11 years at IMMA
and with a string of other key roles including Irish Commissioner for the Venice Biennale in 1993, and the Sao Paulo Biennale in 1994, he left in 2001 to become an independent curator and then to direct Dublin’s City Arts Centre strategic review in 2002. He has been chairman of the board of trustees of the Liverpool Biennial since 2001 and has served in a number of prestigious judging roles including the Artes Mundi - Wales International Visual Art Prize, the Jerwood and John Moores Painting Prizes."At Interface, we see ourselves coming up with models of practice, using visual art and design at their best to provide a platform in often depressed areas of Northern Ireland for shared ventures based on new knowledge and new ways of doing things," Professor McGonagle said.
For further information, please contact:
David Young
Telephone: 028 90366074
Email: David Young
