The Arts and Crafts Movement

The Arts and Crafts Movement: Making It Irish accompanies the first comprehensive exhibition of Irish Arts and Crafts practice at the McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College. The exhibition celebrates the centenary of one of Ireland's major twentieth-century aesthetic achievements, the Honan Chapel in Cork City--a building consecrated in 1916 during a period of tumultuous political change. Like the more well known Irish Literary Revival, the Irish Arts and Crafts movement demonstrates how extraordinary cultural innovation emerged as a country struggled to create new identities and to reimagine a pre-conquest national culture in an increasingly volatile present. The Arts and Crafts Movement: Making It Irish, edited by co-curator Vera Kreilkamp, places more than 150 ecclesiastical and domestic objects created between 1885 and 1930 in the contexts of nationalism, feminism, Celtic Revivalism, and modernism. Irish and North American scholars exploring the movement in more than a dozen illustrated essays include Nicola Gordon Bowe, Janice Helland, Marjorie Howes, Paul Larmour, Tom#65533;s O'Carrag#65533;in, Fintan O'Toole, Nancy Netzer, and Virginia Teehan.