Twenty Years On... The Bogside Artists of Derry, Northern Ireland

The Bogside Artists of Derry, famous for their murals they call The People's Gallery are celebrating the birth of their vision begun in 1994 for a narrative of murals commemorating the key events in their town's history. End Quote

"In my five years in the building I have never seen so many people so excited by an art exhibition. We actually had senators and representatives askin

(1888PressRelease) August 22, 2014 - In the Bogside area of Derry Northern Ireland there exists The People's Gallery which is composed of twelve large-scale street murals depicting key events of the last 30+ years since the first march for justice by the predominantly Catholic community in October 1968.

This came at the end of many years of Unionist tyranny in the city and elsewhere in the province. The People's Gallery of Murals is visited by many thousands of tourists each year.

This month the creators of the murals, the three artists Tom Kelly, William Kelly and Kevin Hasson celebrate the twentieth year since they began the work.

"It is our vision, above all, that we gifted to the city, how to rescue our history from tabloid sensationalism and misinformation and relay it in a simple and powerful way so that visitors especially could empathize with the events and the people depicted. As a Christian the spiritual content of our work is paramount to me personally." (Tom Kelly).

"We took parochial events and universalised them through art so that people everywhere could respond to them. And people do. From Spain, Yugoslavia, Palestine, Somalia and other troubled regions of the world visitors who come here respond deeply to what we have expressed. Without us the story of our collective struggle would never have been expressed. Moreover, we put our necks on the line to do so. We took dreadful, personal risks every day we scaled the scaffolding to work on our paintings. People ignore this simple fact. The book we wrote on our work for example has never been reviewed by any mainline newspaper in Ireland or England." (Kevin Hasson).

"With low self-esteem virtually a disease here and the inferiority complex the principal motivation behind political figures and activists in general we have had a hell of a time fighting for survival. Praise from the cultural cognoscenti we dared not hope for, financial support we were left to dream about, recognition an impossibility. We are independent, work for no political party and we have paid a hefty price indeed for our so-called 'right' to creative freedom. We celebrate now our twenty years of surviving as a group against all these obstacles with great pride; pride in our achievement first of all, pride in the support we have received from the ordinary people... and pride that we said something in art that put an end to the prevailing graffiti propaganda and returned freedom of expression to its real purpose which is to express the truth of our human experience. These things nobody take away from us." (William Kelly)

Last month the artists received the prestigious Kurt Schwitters Fellowship Award from Littoral director Dr. Ian Hunter. Schwitters is considered the precursor of Pablo Picasso and arguably Germany's greatest artist artist of the last century.

http://www.bogsidemurals.net

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