From Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media
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The Minister for Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media, Catherine Martin, has today (31 May) announced the 10 new recipients of the Markievicz Award for 2023.
The Markievicz Award is designed to support artists to develop their craft and ultimately produce great art that recognises and commemorates the role of women in the historical period 1912-1923 covered by the Decade of Centenaries Programme, and beyond.
The 10 Awards announced today are to the artists:
Awards under the scheme have been made each year since 2019. Since 2021 up to 10 artists (either individual artists working alone or in collaboration with others) have been supported up to a value of €25,000 per individual or group. The Minister’s department is partnering with the Arts Council on the administration of the scheme under the Decade of Centenaries Programme 2012-2023.
Minister Martin said:
“The 10 artists announced today as Markievicz Award recipients join the 32 artists already in receipt of the Award since it began in 2019. The Award honours Constance de Markievicz – herself an artist – and provides valuable support to artists from all backgrounds and genres to develop their craft and produce new work that reflects on the role of women in the period covered by the centenary commemorations and beyond. This is the fifth year of the Award and I am grateful to the Arts Council for both administering the award and for providing additional support to facilitate access for artists to the Award.”
Minister Martin added:
“Each of the artists I met in Dublin recognises the importance of acknowledging, understanding and highlighting the vital role played by women individually and collectively in our history. I look forward to following the progress of this latest group of Markievicz Award artists and to encountering the work they produce as a tangible legacy of the Decade of Centenaries Programme. Creative expression is a vital outlet and resource for our society, in articulating contentious history and informing our present thinking and future aspirations. We value this resource highly in Ireland and are fortunate to have over 100 years of artistic output that reflects us, challenges us and inspires us as an independent nation with our own distinct identity on the world stage.”
This group of awardees brings the total number of artists funded under the Award to 42, with a full allocation of almost €1 million over the 5 years 2019-2023, under the Decade of Centenaries Programme.
The Award means different things to each artist, for example:
The department has also supported a number of other creative and cultural projects under the Programme as part of its Creative Imagination Strand over the final 3 years of the Programme including an Artist-in-Residence scheme for a number of National Cultural Institutions, the Military Archives and Ireland’s Virtual Record Treasury Research Project; support for wider cultural programming in the National Cultural Institutions (IMMA, the NGI and the Crawford Gallery) and a major collaboration with the Arts Council on ART:2023, a call to artists and arts organisations to create new and exciting work, while reflecting on the themes of the Decade of Centenaries Programme 2012-2023.
Over that period the department also provided that at least €15,000 of the annual €50,000 allocation to each local authority under the Programme would be used to support creative expression projects.