Black, Eileen

views updated

Black, Eileen

PERSONAL:

Education: Queen's University, Belfast, Ireland, Ph.D., 1999.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Ulster Museum, Botanic Gardens, Belfast BT9 5AB, Northern Ireland. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Ulster Museum, Belfast, Northern Ireland, curator of fine art; honorary curator of the Belfast Harbour Commissioners collection. Former editor of the Lisburn Historical Society Journal.

WRITINGS:

Paintings, Sculptures, and Bronzes in the Collection of the Belfast Harbour Commissioners, Belfast Harbour Commissioners (Belfast, Northern Ireland), 1983.

A Catalogue of the Permanent Collection: Three: Irish Oil Paintings, 1572-c. 1830, Ulster Museum (Belfast, Northern Ireland), 1991.

A Sesquicentennial Celebration: Art from the Queen's University Collection, Queen's University (Belfast, Northern Ireland), 1995.

A Catalogue of the Permanent Collection: Four: Irish Oil Paintings, 1831-1900, Ulster Museum (Belfast, Northern Ireland), 1997.

(With S.B. Kennedy and W.A. Maguire) Dreams and Traditions: 300 Years of British and Irish Painting from the Collection of the Ulster Museum, Ulster Museum (Belfast, Northern Ireland), 1997.

(Editor) Drawings, Paintings, and Sculptures: The Catalog, Museums and Galleries of Northern Ireland (Belfast, Northern Ireland), 2000.

Art in Belfast, 1760-1888: Art Lovers or Philistines?, Irish Academic Press (Portland, OR), 2006.

Contributor to books, including The Oxford Companion to Irish History, 2nd edition, edited by S.J. Connolly, Oxford University Press (London, England), 2007; and the World of Hibernia.

SIDELIGHTS:

Eileen Black is the curator of fine art at the Ulster Museum in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Her writings focus on the museum's collection (with a special concentration on pre-twentieth-century oil paintings) as well as the development of art in the Belfast region over the past two centuries. She has also served as the editor of the Lisburn Historical Society Journal, a publication dedicated to exploring the cultural past of Lisburn, a city adjacent to Belfast. In Art in Belfast, 1760-1888: Art Lovers or Philistines?, Black provides a historical overview of the city's cultural heritage, from the arrival of English artist Strickland Lowry in the 1760s until the city's first art gallery opened in 1888. Between those dates, just a handful of artists worked in the city, but Black delves into the factors that kept the tiny art community alive and relevant, from patronage and education to commerce.