Yeats Day Festival 2021
10th Yeats Day Festival
Join with the world in marking the 156th birthday of Nobel poet WB Yeats by recording your Yeats poem and sharing it on social media, using the hashtag #yeatsday and tagging Yeats Society Sligo and Yeats Day. The Festival programme is listed below.
Wednesday June 9
Hyde Bridge Gallery presents, in association with Yeats Day, Plate Finds, an exhibition by Sligo artist Alison Hunter.
These new works are a continuation of Alison’s explorations of found broken tableware. Works are of cultural significance which displays respect for our heritage. Everything is interlaced and related by materials used, form, and/or story. Life has been re-instilled into old broken tableware by creating a new function for the piece as art. Felted wool is used to replace the missing parts. Working with wool felt, the pieces are given a softness which contrasts well with the coolness and smooth texture of the original plate.
The exhibition will run until June 27th.
Friday 11 June 8pm
Event will be livestreamed via @yeatssociety Facebook page
ANNUAL NORA NILAND LECTURE, honouring the work of former Sligo county librarian and member of Yeats Society Sligo, who, in the 1960s, gathered an extraordinary collection of Irish 20th century art.
“Secret Identity: The Comic Strips of Jack B. Yeats“, Marking the 150th birthday of Jack B Yeats this year.
Michael Connerty will present an illustrated talk on Jack B. Yeats’ work as a strip cartoonist for a number of popular comics that appeared in the UK between 1892-1917. Yeats’ recurring characters, including circus horse Signor McCoy, detective pastiche Chubblock Homes, and proto-superhero Dicky the Birdman, were once very well-known, part of a boom in cheap and widely distributed comics. These were the forerunners of The Beano and The Dandy. These lively and snappy tales of maritime adventure, stage entertainment and urban spectacle appeared during a key period in the early development of the comic strip, and Yeats was a central figure of the time.
Michael lectures at the IADT, institute of Art, Design & Technology in Dublin.
Saturday 12 June 1pm
Our famous free Yeats Day birthday cake, sponsored by Sligo bakers O’Hehir’s, will be cut and shared. And we will be reading Yeats poetry in our river garden Penny Café, at the Yeats Building. (Adhering to Covid regulations).
Live outside, at Yeats Building, Hyde Bridge, Sligo
Sunday 13 June 11am
Eily Kilgannon School of Speech and Drama will be performing WB Yeats poems from the 2021 students, aged 7-17.
Event will be livestreamed via @yeatssociety Facebook page
Sunday 13 June Noon
Hamilton Gallery presents, in association with Yeats Day, Meditations in Time of Civil War. An exhibition of new work by 125 visual artists, on the theme of this famous poem, written by WB Yeats in 1921.
Sunday 13 June 1.30pm
Paul Murray presents: Banjaxed by Joyce?
An opportunity to get under the skin of one of the greatest books ever written, with a man who has read it countless times and who is related to James Joyce through Joyce’s mother, May Murray.
Event will be livestreamed via @yeatssociety Facebook page