Associate Professor Kristin Dowell is the curator of Talamh agus Teanga: Land and Language in Contemporary Irish Art, which will be on display at the FSU Museum of Fine Arts from January 25th to May 18th, 2024. The first exhibition of Irish art at MoFA, Talamh agus Teanga (pronounced “Tall-uv awe-gus tain-gah”) means “Land and Language” and is a way for the community to see how artists engage the Irish language in contemporary creative practice to reflect on our interconnected worlds. This multidisciplinary exhibition considers relationships between people, language, land, and sea, through the work of ten Irish artists. Gathering artists who are both native speakers and learners of Irish, the exhibition explores the ethos of fite fuaite, the Irish phrase meaning “interwoven or inextricably connected,” through visual art, dance, film, installation, and performance.

Dr. Dowell is a proud speaker of the endangered Irish language with family ties to the townland of Gallach/Castleblakeney in County Galway. This exhibition is the culmination of two years of curatorial research involving numerous virtual and in-person studio visits with artists, research in archives and collections in Ireland, including the ESB Centre for the Study of Irish Art at the National Gallery of Ireland and the National Irish Visual Arts Library, and immersive language work on the beautiful island of Inis Meáin. Curated with the ethical approach of meitheal, the Irish word referencing collaborative work on a project, Dowell has worked alongside each of the artists as well as MoFA staff, including Curatorial Assistant Annie Booth (MA in MCHS alumna 2018), to create this exhibition.

Once on the cusp of being lost, today, the Irish language is experiencing a powerful resurgence. Talamh agus Teanga honors the language and artists who are part of this resurgence through a celebration of the rich vitality of Irish language, art, and culture. The exhibition includes Irish translations of all object labels as well as QR codes that visitors can scan to hear Jane Ní Luasa, native Irish speaker from the Muscraí Gaeltacht in West Cork, reading the Irish language labels.

Artists featured in the exhibition: Kari Cahill, Ceara Conway, Liadin Cooke, Dorothy Cross, Miriam de Búrca, Katie Holten, Siobhán Ní Dhuinnín, Méadhbh O’Connor, Éimear O’Keane, and Kathy Scott, The Trailblazery.

Please join us for an opening reception at MoFA on January 25th, 2024 from 6:00 to 8:00 PM, free and open to the public with light refreshments provided.

For a full list of events and programming connected to the exhibition visit this page.

Images, TOP: Méadhbh O’Connor. Studio shot, 2023. Preparations of Biosystem ahead of the forthcoming exhibition at MoFA. CENTER: Siobhán Ní Dhuinnín and her father Pádraig Ó Duinnín in rehearsal for Bád Shiobhán (2021). Photographer Claire Keogh. BOTTOM: Miriam de Búrca. The Land Remembers for You. 2018. Acrylic ink on watercolor paper. 12.5 inches x 9.5 inches. Installation view courtesy of Dr. Kristin Dowell.

This exhibition is sponsored by the State of Florida through the Division of Arts and Culture, the FSU Council on Research + Creativity, Culture Ireland, FSU’s Native American and Indigenous Studies Center, the Department of Art History, and an Emigrant Support Programme Heritage Grant through the Government of Ireland’s Global Irish Program. Additional funding for this program was provided through a grant from Florida Humanities with funds from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this exhibition do not necessarily represent those of the Florida Humanities Council or the National Endowment for the Humanities.

	Doctoral student Danelle Bernten published “Tigers’ Eyes on Alabama Paper: Tailing Thornton Dial’s Drawings in the Princeton University Art Museum,” in the Winter 2024 edition of Princeton University Art Museum magazine.
	Doctoral student Quentin Clark published “Symbolizing Reverence and Imperial Identity: The Elephant on the epi ton barbaron Seal,” in volume 54 of Comitatus: A Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies (2023). His paper centers on one of only two known Byzantine seals featuring the image of an elephant. Quentin explores themes of administrative hierarchy and imperial identity, arguing that the use of the image of the elephant on this epi ton barbaron seal served dual functions. It represented its owner’s claim to imperial identity, particularly in relation to his administrative title, and it also functioned as a symbol of its owner’s own reverence for the emperor. Comitatus, published annually by the UCLA CMRS Center for Early Global Studies, features articles by graduate students and recent PhDs in any field of late antique, medieval, Renaissance, or early modern studies.
	Doctoral candidate Nina Gonzalbez has two new publications: “Brick by Brick: Constructing Identity at Don Lope Fernández de Luna’s Parroquieta at La Seo,” in Globalism in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Age, edited by Albrecht Classen (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2023); and “Imagining the Medieval in Andalusia: Seville as the ‘exotic’ in Film,” in Cine-Medievalismos: The Middle Ages in Luso- and Hispanophone Film and Television, edited by Erika Loic, Alicia Miguélez Cavero, and Felipe Brandi (Madrid: Iberoamericana / Vervuert; forthcoming 2024). She will also present the second essay at the 59th International Conference on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo in May, 2024.
	Doctoral candidate Tess McCoy will present her paper “Unbroken Connections: Customary Materials in Contemporary Alaska Native Art” at The Materiality of Resistance symposium at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco this March. Tess received support from the Terra Foundation and a Beard Travel Award from the Art History department to support her participation in the conference. Tess’s paper focuses on two installation works by Sonya Kelliher-Combs (Iñupiaq, Athabascan, Irish, German). She argues that these works are sources of healing, resistance, and reassert Indigenous stories, histories, and experiences through their creation, display, and viewers’ interactions with them.
	Doctoral candidate Sheila Scoville co-authored the essay “Eggplant: Food, Sex, and Poison” for the Plant Humanities Lab, a digital platform developed by Dumbarton Oaks and JSTOR. Sheila will also present “A Chicano in a Color Field: César Augusto Martínez’s Bato con Sunglasses” at the 112th annual College Art Association conference in Chicago, on the panel “Expanded Histories of Postwar Painting: Identity, Memory, Visibility,” which is chaired by FSU alumna Lesley Wolff (PhD ’18). Additionally, Sheila was awarded a 5-week Interdisciplinary Residency this year at Oak Spring Garden Foundation, where she will be in a cohort with other scholars as well as artists, writers, and scientists examining plants, landscapes, gardens, and the natural world as she conducts research for her dissertation on agave in colonial Mexican manuscripts.
	BA student Caelen Trujillo published “‘My Work is Painting:’ Politics and Apocalypse in the Art of Rufino Tamayoin” in the NCHC Journal of Undergraduate Research & Creative Activity in the fall of 2023.
	Doctoral student Estefanía Vallejo Santiago published the article “Echoes of Identity: Afro-Puerto Rican Women and the Creole House” in The LatinX Project, a program of New York University.
	Doctoral candidate Emily White published a book review of Monique Kornell’s Flesh and Bones: The Art of Anatomy, in volume 54 of Comitatus: A Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies (2023). The reviewed book corresponds to the 2022 exhibition of the same name at the Getty Center, which featured anatomical artworks within the collection.