If you missed it the first time around, you now have another chance to see our recent exhibition ‘Norah McGuinness: Illustrations to the Stories of Red Hanrahan’. The Model is delighted to present this exhibition, drawn from The Niland Collection, in Roscommon Arts Centre, in collaboration with the lovely people there.

Thanks to a grant from The Heritage Council these works have been conserved and reframed and this is only the second time that they have been exhibited publically in many years.

Norah McGuinness was born in Derry in 1903 and studied at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art, and later in Paris under the renowned Cubist, André Lhote. McGuinness was still a student when she met W. B. Yeats in 1920s Dublin. He was so impressed with her work that he later invited her to illustrate his book ‘The Stories of Red Hanrahan and the Secret Rose’ which he planned to republish in 1927. The drawings are striking for their Byzantine Modernist style although one critic deemed the style “disturbing” on the publication of the book in 1927.

Throughout her career McGuinness utilised her extraordinary creative talents, by branching out into illustration, theatre design and window dressing, to supplement her income. She created fashion illustrations for Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and The Bystander magazines, and designed windows for Altman’s department store on Fifth Avenue New York and Brown Thomas in Dublin.

McGuinness was one of a number of pioneering female Irish artists who brought European modernist influences to Ireland at a time when the arts were predominantly patriarchal and traditional.

This exhibition is on display in the Roscommon Arts Centre from March 16th to April 26th 2012. For more information, please visit Roscommon Arts Centres.