About this Event
This talk will be recorded and made available online at a later date. ISL interpretation will be provided.
From Ents Officer at 17 at Trinity College Dublin in the mid-1970s through a long career in the music business from 1977 until 2001, managing The Virgin Prunes, The Fountainhead, Cactus World News, Hinterland, Katell Keineg and Gemma Hayes, Kieran Owens has also been involved with a number of Dublin’s iconic cultural institutions, including the Douglas Hyde Gallery, The Project Arts Centre, Graphic Studio Dublin, the Office of Public Works and, currently, the Royal Dublin Society.
As a co-founder and long-time publisher and editor of the free Dublin-based cultural newspaper The Event Guide, which ran from 1984 until 2008, he has played a part in not only recording but also shaping some of the most exciting developments in the Irish capital’s artistic, literary and social life. By encouraging a cohort of brilliant young and deeply committed writers, many of whom are now in well-established and influential media positions and arts organisations, he helped foster an environment in which a broad range of alternative artistic pursuits were supported when elsewhere they were overlooked or actively ignored.
For this talk in the Oak Room, Kieran plots a chronological trail through the highs and lows of his own cultural journey in the country’s capital city, referencing Led Zeppelin at the National Stadium, the impact of the murders of the Miami Showband and of Charles Self, the arrival of punk, and the hope for and later disappointment of the once great idea that was Temple Bar. Along the way he acknowledges the positive influence of the Hot Press and In Dublin magazines, the rise and fall of the pirate radio stations, the God-like ascent of Dave Fanning, the impact on live music of the opening of Whelan’s and Vicar Street, and the importance of numerous other developments in the creative worlds of cinema, theatre, literature and music, as well as, same as it ever was, officialdom’s on/off support for the arts in general.
KIERAN OWENS
Educated in the mid-1970s and early 1980s at Trinity College, Dublin, Kieran Owens was Entertainments Officer there for two years in 1975 and 1976. While attending the university, he joined the Board of the Douglas Hyde Gallery as a student representative, working on exhibitions of art by Otto Dix, M. C. Escher, Max Ernst, Mervyn Peake, James Ensor, Edward and Nancy Keinholtz, and Sean Scully, to name but a few international examples.
A long career in the music business began in 1977 and ended in 2001, during which time he was the manager of The Virgin Prunes, The Fountainhead, Cactus World News, Hinterland, Katell Keineg and Gemma Hayes.
Having established it in 1984, he was one of the co-founders and publishers of the free Dublin-based cultural newspaper The Event Guide. On leaving the music business, he took over the publishing and editing of the paper until its closure 2008. Throughout its life, he additionally specialised in writing fine art previews, reviews and interviews.
Kieran was a board member and Chair of the Board of the Project Arts Centre and returned to the Douglas Hyde Gallery as a Board member for fifteen years, chairing it up to the end of his final term in 2016. He was, until recently, a Board member and Chair of the Board of Graphic Studio Dublin.
In December of 2022, Kieran was formally elected to the Committee of Arts at the Royal Dublin Society (RDS), a position that he currently holds.
Following several years of working on freelance art projects with fine art print publishers Stoney Road Press, he was appointed as the cultural programme curator for a number of historic properties in the care of Ireland's Office of Public Works, including Emo Court in Co. Laois and Doneraile Court in Co. Cork, as well as the Irish Government's official state residence, Farmleigh House, which position at the latter venue he still occupies.
For Farmleigh Gallery he also curated 'Face To Face’ in 2018, a large exhibition of portraits of Irish cultural figures by the Paris-based Anglo-Belgian painter Anthony Palliser and, more recently from November 2022 to February 2023, the major photographic retrospective of six decades of work by the renowned photographer Mike Bunn.
Throughout the years 2019, 2022 and 2023 Kieran was also instrumental in arranging painting, print and drawing exhibitions at the Dower House Gallery at Emo Court for the Office of Public Works, including solo shows by the artists Mary Dillon, Ellie Dunne, Susan Early, Ruth O’Donnell, Nicola Lynch Morrin, Hilary Kinahan, Stephen Lawlor, Niamh Flanagan and Kate MacDonagh.
Kieran also was responsible for initiating exhibitions at the Irish Architectural Archive, including one on the life of the architect James Franklin Fuller and also the 100th birthday retrospective of the work of the Co. Down-born architect and architectural writer Robert Maxwell, which included sculptural busts by his wife, the English artist and architect Celia Scott, which ran at the Archive’s Merrion Square gallery from September to November 2022.
At the present moment Kieran is involved with ‘Kwaidan’, an exhibition of fine art print works by 20 Irish and 20 Japanese artists which takes as its central inspiration the ghost stories collected by Patrick Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904). Having launched in July 2023 in Japan, the exhibition is currently touring there and will also be shown in Ireland, the UK and the USA between 2024 and 2026.
www.kwaidanexhibition.com
Kieran Owens can be contacted at
Image courtesy of Dublin City Library & Archive.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Oak Room, Mansion House, Dawson Street, Dublin 2, Ireland
EUR 0.00