Irish Artists At Their Tether In New York

Mike Dowley

t’s a long way from Church Road to West 52nd Street, but it would appear that Lisa McCleary is very much at home on either.

Having made the trip back from New York in 2023 for an RHA show and her own exhibition here in Greystones, Ms McCleary is about to curate a major celebration in her adopted home of fellow Irish artists.

Martin Mullin

Taking place from Tuesday February 17th to Monday 23rd (after a launch on Saturday 21st), Tether will be at Gallery MC on West 52nd Street.

And that’s in New York, as opposed to Greystones. Just in case you were worried the town had supersized even more overnight.

The artists with the Empire state of mind are George Bolster, Helen O’Leary, Martin Mullin, Mike Dowley, the late Brian O’Doherty (aka Patrick Ireland), and, of course, the McCleary lass herself.

Here’s the official lowdown on the hoedown…

Tether brings together Irish visual artists living and working in New York, exploring the invisible lines that bind us across distance, time, and place.

To be Irish abroad is often to live in a state of tension: between departure and return, inheritance and reinvention, belonging and estrangement. A tether is not a chain – it allows movement, drift, and transformation – yet it holds. It suggests attachment without confinement, connection without stasis.

Helen O’Leary

For artists shaped by Ireland and practicing elsewhere, this tether is felt in language, memory, landscape, politics, family, and the body itself.

The works in this exhibition do not attempt to define Irishness as a fixed identity. Instead, they trace how it is carried, resisted, reimagined, or quietly endured. Some artists pull against the tether, testing its limits; others lean into it, allowing it to ground their practice.

Set in New York – a city deeply entwined with Irish histories of emigration and labor – Tether situates these practices within a global art context while remaining attentive to origin. The exhibition also honours the legacy of Brian O’Doherty, whose conceptual rigour and engagement with language and space continue to influence Irish artistic practice across generations.

Together, the works in Tether reveal Irish identity as dynamic and unresolved – stretched across geographies, shaped by migration, and continually rewritten through making.

The exhibition offers a space for reflection on how we remain connected to what formed us, even as we move through new worlds, carrying those ties quietly within us.

Just like the Guide!

You can check out Gallery MC here, explore Ms McCleary’s website here, find out about her early years here, and follow the lady’s latest shenanigans on Instagram here.