Patrick Ireland

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Patrick Ireland is an Irish sculptor, Conceptual artist and an Installation artist. He was born in County Roscommon in 1934 and lives and works in the United States. Patrick Ireland is not his original name; he changed his name from Brian O'Doherty in reaction to the Bloody Sunday killings in Derry in 1972.

In The modern art collection, Trinity College Dublin, David Scott writes that

"Much influenced by Marcel Duchamp he is an essentially interrogative artist, constantly questioning artistic conventions and the assumptions on which we base our aesthetic judgements."

A graduate of Trinity College, Dublin, and the Cambridge Medical School, O’Doherty spent a year working in a cancer hospital and, after emigrating to the United States in 1957, conducted medical research at Harvard, before devoting himself full-time to the visual arts. He has also served as editor of Art in America and was the on-air art critic for NBC. Currently, he is professor of fine arts and media at the Southampton College campus of Long Island University.

For many years, O'Doherty was an influential member of the senior staff of the National Endowment for the Arts, first as director of the Visual Arts Program, and subsequently as director of the Media Arts Program, where he was responsible for the creation of such major public television series as American Masters and Great Performances. He is the author of numerous works of art criticism, including his book American Masters and the influential essay "Inside the White Cube." He has also written novels: The Strange Case of Mademoiselle P. (1992) and the 2000 Booker Prize nominated The Deposition of Father McGreevey (1999).

For more than thirty years, O'Doherty has been married to art historian and former chair of the Art History department at Barnard College, Barbara Novak.