FÁILTE | WELCOME

Fáilte and welcome to the Carrickahowley Gallery’s Bealtaine exhibition, a transatlantic collaboration with Nua Collective that features the work of Lauren Donovan, Daniel Faiella, John Murray, Paul McMahon, Saoirse O'Sullivan, Roser Perez, Eamonn B. Shanahan, and Anne Martin Walsh.

Curator's Notes

This May 1st marks the Celtic celebration of Bealtaine, a celebration of the spring season and reinvention, renewal, and rebirth. In that spirit, Carrickahowley Gallery offers a transatlantic and transcultural collaboration between artists on both sides of the pond. To heighten this sense of collaborative work, we are featuring the work of Irish American artists from New England and the NUA Collective, an Irish art collective directed by the vision of Eamonn Shanahan. In addition, the Featurette focuses upon a literal re-presentation and rebirthing of a mural (now destroyed) by Mike Alewitz in the Ardoyne area of North Belfast, a mural that has as its message the solidarity and shared collective resistance of oppressed peoples across the Global South. Such a dynamic “mash up” emphasizes, we hope, the shared responsibilities and collective energies of all of us as we create new spaces for new visions and for new ways of being in the world. Moreover, the spirit of collaboration emphasized in this exhibit asks us all to contemplate our interdependency, rather than our individual interests, in the forging of new definitions of “Irishness” and Irish American identities, art, histories, and cultural work. In this spirit, we offer you an amazing line-up of visual art as activism toward a new and generative composite humanity--one that defies borders and boundaries and that creates new community.

We at Carrickahowley Gallery celebrate this collaboration with NUA Collective and Mike Alewitz with a hearty thanks for their commitments to the exhibit and to an art of change and mutuality. Special thanks to Eamonn Shanahan who so graciously collated and contributed the NUA art and artists to the show. And an extra-special thanks to Mike Alewitz for his very generous permission to re-present his Malcolm X mural.

Without further ado then, we proudly present the Bealtaine exhibit…

Lauren Donovan

Donovan | Artist Statement

Lauren Brooks Donovan is a painter. She received her BFA from The College of Fine Arts at Boston University in 2011 and her MFA from Maine College of Art & Design in 2021. Born and raised in Northampton, Massachusetts, a city the Los Angeles Times once called “a haven for women” and the National Enquirer deemed “a strange town where men aren’t wanted,” she is endlessly grappling with the experience of womanhood.

laurenbrooksdonovan.com

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Daniel Faiella

Faiella | Artist Statement

Daniel Faiella was born and raised in New Hampshire. His interest in landscape painting has its roots in the rocky, forested, and mountainous terrain of the Northeastern United States in which, as a child, he first became aware of his surroundings through exploration on long walks and hikes. Another significant influence on his relationship with the landscape came from his childhood interest in Irish mythology. In his teens, he became interested in the way in which Irish mythology weaves the supernatural world of the gods into the natural landscape of everyday experience. In the view of the world presented by these stories, there is no strict division between supernatural and natural, magical and ordinary, or animate and inanimate. Beginning his studies in art at the age of 16, with painter Paul Ingbretson, Daniel completed a 6 year atelier curriculum in classical drawing and painting before pursuing his BFA in drawing and painting at the University of New Hampshire. During this time he also worked as studio assistant to artist and illustrator Tomie DePaola. He lives and paints in the seacoast area of New Hampshire, within a short drive of the mountains, the ocean, and the woods he first explored as a child.

danielfaiella.com

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John Murray

Murray | Artist Statement

My current work is a visual remembrance of my time living and working in Russia and the Soviet Union. The paintings proposed reproduce fragments of text and images selected from newspapers and magazines from the period which are then overlaid with a less structured layer that attempts to reveal the patterns and paradoxes – the warp and weft of real life – concealed beneath the public surface. Although my work derives from personal engagement with the content, I consider myself a formalist, i.e., for me, form is more important than content.

nuacollective.ie

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Paul McMahon

McMahon | Artist Statement

My interest in art began as a student of Limerick Art College. A lifelong interest in art culminated in an outpouring of creativity when I finally picked up my own brushes and began to paint again a few years ago. My inspiration comes from living in the Arizona desert, the UK and returning to my roots in Ireland, enjoying the raw beauty of living on the West coast in County Clare. When I sit down to paint it simply comes straight out of my mind down my arm and onto the brush.

nuacollective.ie

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Saoirse O'Sullivan

O'Sullivan | Artist Statement

Saoirse works with a traditional approach of Fine Art painting using only Acrylic and Oil on canvas. Holding a surrealist whimsical style throughout, with the use of strong, vibrant, and unexpected colours. Pushing boundaries, the Artist wishes to only highlight the outstanding country of Ireland. The artist’s current work reflects local scenes from Saoirse’s own doorstep – The beauty of Ireland and specifically County Cork.

nuacollective.ie

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Roser Perez

Perez | Artist Statement

As a sculptor and a silversmith, I sense and feel in a dimensional way and I am forever inspired by life and the natural forces that shape our environment, like time, water, wind, pressure... I am strongly attracted to the natural materials that these forces have produced in their ever-evolving geological legacy. My work is filled with life cycle experiences, enriched by the unique people I have shared them with, informed by different cultures and points of view, always pushing its boundaries in search of connection. From the stone carving process of large marble and limestone sculptures to the shaping of malleable metals in my relief and repousse work, this passion for form and design has found its expression in the art of silversmithing of noble metals. From stone sculpture to jewellery, the challenge remains as a discovery voyage to the universal shape and form and its infinite human expressions.

nuacollective.ie

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Eamonn B. Shanahan

Shanahan | Artist Statement

The work focuses on the emotive entity that can be examined in each painting. Each painting is created without direct preconception but with a compound memory of personal and cultural experiences. Each artwork evokes an atmospheric space; structures, or lack thereof, that resonate an internal, emotional archetype. Interacting shapes and towering plinths form the scale of the environment which is interrupted with brush strokes and plaster rendering that define the emotional pace giving a live theatricality that aims to resonate to the viewer’s life journey.

nuacollective.ie

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Anne Martin Walsh

Walsh | Artist Statement

My practice revolves around painting, photography, and printmaking, sometimes installed in combination with sculptural elements. Central to this work are themes of sexual and cultural identity that relate to our natural environment and reference a range of topics taken from history and mythology. My research involves an examination of geomagnetic ley-lines, ancient sites, carvings including the Sheela-na-gig and rituals such as divination. The feminine and the sacred play a significant role in my methodology. These research sources are important in my ongoing inquiries, as I see this exploration as imperative to a way of reconnecting with the earth and creating a new visual language. I am interested in colour, the layering of paint and different forms of mark-making, working intuitively. The work becomes more about the medium as a painting evolves, allowing a certain ebb and flow while encouraging the plasticity of the paint. The art becomes visceral, primal, and gestural in its making, with embedded references to a landscape inscribed through the chosen medium. Through my work I aim to suggest a state of flux and reciprocity between past and present, earthly and otherworldly, seen and unseen, evoking a sense of being grounded for both myself and the viewer. A physical and spiritual connection to the earth, as well as an awareness of environmental issues, is at the core of all my artwork.

nuacollective.ie

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Featurette | Mike Alewitz
Malcolm X Inter/Nationalist Mural
Ardoyne, North Belfast, Ireland

This Bealtaine Exhibit, Carrickahowley Gallery would like to focus upon the other references associated with the May 1st holiday, particularly May Day and its relation to international socialist protest for peace and justice. In fact, a confluence of the Irish holiday and the political histories of this day around the world occurred in North Belfast in the early 21st century (2002) when a contemporary political artist in the US painted a mural of Malcolm X in the Ardoyne neighborhood of North Belfast.

Mike Alewitz painted the mural: Malcolm X Inter/Nationalist. Alewitz has dedicated his creative practice to muralism and street art that consistently “speaks” for the rights of labor and the oppressed across the globe.

In solidarity with the North Belfast community that he sees as an echo of the communities in the US like Little Rock, Arkansas that experienced similar “segregation and victimization” during the US Civil Rights Movement, Alewitz’s mural highlights the history of Irish Civil Rights struggles and their alignment and appropriation of the strategies and visual poetics of African American struggles for social and economic justice.

More importantly though, Alewitz’s focus upon Malcolm X, a figure that he described as " the greatest voice of Black nationalism” became the logical choice for the Ardoyne mural because “he was also an internationalist. He understood the inter-connection between nationalism and internationalism.” Stressing such international solidarity, the mural significantly connects struggles for freedom across the global south, even referencing such struggles in Palestine and, potentially, anywhere that the forces of mastery, capitalism and colonialism have extracted from the marginalized the potential for “human possibility.”

Laura Friel, writing for AnPoblacht/Republican News, said in 2002 of Alewitz’s work:

Inspired by the images of Holy Cross, this summer Mike came to North Belfast to share his visual message of international solidarity and struggle with the people of Ardoyne. As a political muralist Mike has a formidable reputation both within the USA and internationally. His most famous work, the Pathfinder mural in New York, reproduced on numerous posters and book covers, has become an image instantly recognizable in many countries throughout the world. [Later mutilated and destroyed by the US Socialist Workers Party - ma]

And Alewitz himself has underlined the connections, stating “I hope that the imagery will encourage people to read Malcolm X not just as an American leader but as a World leader." He goes on to explain his mural:

The Ardoyne area had been the flash point of struggle against racist loyalist mobs that have come out to protest the right of Catholic children to attend Holy Cross School. It has been called the Little Rock of Northern Ireland. - This mural was an effort to give expression to the idea of a working-class solidarity that transcends national borders. I chose Malcolm X as the central image, because he was a nationalist who understood that we also had to build an international movement to transform society.

What emerged from these connections was a mural that, indeed, extended the critical consciousness of those who saw it and “transcended the national borders” of our collective cultural imaginations, forcing all of us to question the ways in which we are all historically linked by systems and structures of power that share a master-script intended to force upon us roles that blind us to our collective power. It was a revolutionary mural in ways that also transcend, in other words, the boundaries and borders that divide us historically at the same time as shifting us away from the essentialist focus of a blind patriotism, localized and exclusionary, into a more promising composite of purpose and identity.

Alewitz’s mural of Malcolm X was really about hybridity and transculturation, therefore, and at its most powerful, it imagined a crucial link between us all that is often occluded in cultural nationalism. The Malcolm X mural asked us to see ourselves as many selves, as selves that are constantly growing and changing as we learn of other histories of Othering that emanate from the same ideological sources and structures. It was about the space between us all as an interstice of possibility, an in-between space that could be activated as a positive space of visualizing a new collective within the space of colonial oppression. A link across all of the ponds of our exploitation. A historical camaraderie.

Such powerful links may have proven too provocative at the time, and the mural was destroyed in a great act of both irony and capitulation, by none other than Sinn Fein and, as Alewitz comments:

In a shameful act, the mural of our martyred revolutionary leader was painted over by Sinn Fein at a time when they were attempting to reach an accommodation with Loyalists and the British occupation forces. The action of Sinn Fein is no different than if they had painted over a tribute to Bobby Sands.

Murals don’t just exist upon walls, however. They become part of the tableau of our consciousness, and their images are not so easily destroyed by simple censorship. They live on, haunting our histories and demanding that we re-see ourselves again, regardless of the defacement of their actual materiality. They become images of our future as well as our collective past in this way—they refuse to be un-seen, to be made invisible, as labor has been made “invisible” historically.

And so here, in Carrickahowley Gallery, Alewitz’s mural has appeared again to challenge us all to radical openness, radical tolerance, radical change, and the great power of art to create new worlds. As one commentator put it, such art is “ideally suited to the postmodern and post-state socialist era, when everything rebellious must be created anew and when ‘culture' along with ‘labor’ are urgently needed to salvage a world from eco-disaster, perpetual war, and the plundering of human possibility.”[2]

Carrickahowley Gallery is proud to offer our virtual wall to yet another iteration of this mural and we celebrate the work of Mike Alewitz and all artists who struggle to free our minds and our eyes. Up the Brush!

Note: All images reproduced with permission of the artist. Please visit Mike Alewitz’s Facebook page, or the Wikipedia page on him for further details of his work and his history. Or, visit his museum and studio in New London, CT at Red Square.