Brian O'Doherty

Brian O'Doherty (born in 1928 in Ballaghaderreen, County Roscommon, Ireland) is an Irish art critic, writer, artist, and academic. He has lived in New York for more than 50 years. He has used a number of alter egos, including Patrick Ireland.

Early life and education

He was born at Ballaghaderreen in County Roscommon in 1928, and grew up in Dublin. He studied medicine at University College Dublin, and did post-graduate work at Cambridge University and at the Harvard School of Public Health.

Early career

He spent a year working in a cancer hospital in 1957 before devoting himself full-time to the visual arts. Speaking of his experience after Harvard:

Career

In the 1960s, he was an art critic for the New York Times. He commissioned Roland Barthes to write his "Death of the Author" essay for a special edition of Aspen magazine in 1967. He has also been an editor of Art in America and an on-air art critic for NBC.

Mid-career, O'Doherty began signing his work under the name "Patrick Ireland" in reaction to the Bloody Sunday killings in Derry in 1972. For many years, O'Doherty was an influential member of the senior staff of the National Endowment for the Arts, first as director of the Visual Arts Program, and subsequently as director of the Media Arts Program, where he was responsible for the creation of such major public television series as American Masters and Great Performances. He is the author of numerous works of art criticism, including his book American Masters and the influential book Inside the White Cube: Ideologies of the Gallery Space (1976), a series of essays first published in Artforum. In the latter book he discusses and invents the term for the contemporary gallery space. He has also written novels: The Strange Case of Mademoiselle P. (1992) and the 2000 Booker Prize-nominated The Deposition of Father McGreevey (1999). He had a retrospective at Dublin's Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art in 2005.

Ireland

Ireland (ⁱ/ˈaɪərlənd/; Irish: Éire [ˈeːɾʲə]; Ulster-Scots: Airlann [ˈɑːrlən]) is an island in the North Atlantic. It is separated from Great Britain to its east by the North Channel, the Irish Sea, and St George's Channel. Ireland is the second-largest island of the British Isles, the third-largest in Europe, and the twentieth-largest on Earth.

Politically, Ireland is divided between the Republic of Ireland (officially named Ireland), which covers five-sixths of the island, and Northern Ireland, which is part of the United Kingdom, and located in the northeast of the island. In 2011 the population of Ireland was about 6.4 million, ranking it the second-most populous island in Europe after Great Britain. Just under 4.6 million live in the Republic of Ireland and just over 1.8 million live in Northern Ireland.

The island's geography comprises relatively low-lying mountains surrounding a central plain, with several navigable rivers extending inland. The island has lush vegetation, a product of its mild but changeable climate which avoids extremes in temperature. Thick woodlands covered the island until the Middle Ages. As of 2013, the amount of land that is wooded in Ireland is about 11% of the total, compared with a European average of 35%. There are 26 extant mammal species native to Ireland. The Irish climate is very moderated and classified as oceanic. As a result, winters are milder than expected for such a northerly area. However, summers are cooler than those in Continental Europe. Rainfall and cloud cover are abundant.

Ireland (disambiguation)

Ireland usually refers to:

Ireland may also refer to:

Former political arrangements of Ireland

Ireland, Bedfordshire

Coordinates: 52°03′36″N 0°20′54″W / 52.06002°N 0.34836°W / 52.06002; -0.34836

Ireland is a hamlet in the civil parish of Southill, Bedfordshire, England.

External links

Media related to Ireland, Bedfordshire at Wikimedia Commons