The Yeats Library in ATU Sligo, in collaboration with the Yeats Society Sligo, invite you to this afternoon and evening event to celebrate the creativity of the Yeats Family. These events are happening on Wednesday 11th June from 12.45-5pm in the Yeats Library and from 8-10pm in the Yeats Society Sligo. Registration: https://forms.office.com/e/xn0ppLqLh1
As W.B. Yeats reaches his 160th birthday this year, the Yeats Library in ATU Sligo, named after the whole family, is hosting a programme of events in collaboration with the Yeats Society Sligo to mark the occasion. This afternoon and evening event will take place in the Yeats Library, ATU Sligo and the Yeats Society Sligo on Wednesday 11th June to celebrate the creativity of the Yeats Family including W.B. Yeats, Lily (Susan) & Lolly (Elizabeth) Yeats, Jack B. Yeats, Anne Yeats and Michael Yeats. The programme will take place in ATU Sligo from 12.45-5pm and in the Yeats Society Sligo from 8pm-10pm.
Yeats Library, ATU Sligo,12.45-5pm
12.45-1pm: Welcome Remarks
1pm-2pm: Talk: Dr Adrian Paterson (University of Galway), Rent: the material of WB Yeats’s Crazy Jane. Abstract below.
Chaired by Dr Keith Hopper, Yeats Academy of Arts, Design & Architecture, ATU Sligo
2pm-2.15pm: Showcase of the Anne Yeats Collection and the Michael Keohane Collection donated to the Yeats Library, ATU Sligo
2.15pm: Afternoon Tea/Coffee/Snack
2.30pm-3.30pm: Music with John Kavanagh & Ray Coen & Poetry with ATU Staff & Students
Chaired by Lisa Moore, Special Collections Librarian, Yeats Library, ATU Sligo
3.30pm - 4.15pm: Talk: Dr Kathryn McSweeney (ATU St Angelas) on Lacework & Lace Workers in early 20th century.
Chaired by Dr Johanna Archbold, Head Librarian, ATU Sligo
4.15pm-5pm: Exhibition Launch of Lace & Textile Art Collections from the EUTRACtionroject, student work from St Angelas and local schoolchildren workshop pieces.
Yeats Society Sligo, 8pm-10pm
The evening portion of the event will include a Music & Drama Ensemble celebrating the Yeats Family featuring Sligo artists including John Kavanagh, Aileen Concannon, Ray Coen, Ciarán McCauley & guests, ending with a saxophonist on the Hyde Bridge for the welcoming of the Oak Moon, which is the June moon, to ring in W.B. Yeats' 160th Birthday kicking off the Yeats Society’s events Thursday-Sunday marking the occasion.
See the full Yeats Day programme of events from the Yeats Society Sligo, Thursday 12th - Sunday 16th June 2025 here: https://www.yeatssociety.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/yeats-day-programme-2025-2.pdf
A warm welcome to all to join us starting from 12.45 with refreshments and afternoon snacks at around 2.30pm. To register for both parts of the day or just one part, fill out the form here: https://forms.office.com/e/xn0ppLqLh1 and contact library.sligo@atu.ie if you have any queries.
Keynote from Dr Adrian Paterson, Abstract
All the younger Yeats family were involved in material making in some way, whether drawing, painting, printing, embroidery, costume and set design – or writing. This talk explores the effect of dealing with such materials on their arts. In particular it examines the economies of manufacture in print, rag paper, and poetry that influenced WB Yeats and his siblings by giving a new hearing to the nineteenth-century broadside ballad craze about Crazy Jane, a ‘fallen’ woman wearing ragged clothes and discarded by society. In considering these ballads’ rough pirate manufacture on torn cloth paper, and listening to the printed voice of Jane herself, we can see how they affected the texture of the ‘Crazy Jane’ poems in Yeats’s sequence Words for Music Perhaps, which in playing with gaps and rents and holes probe the materiality and immateriality of textiles, song, and the body. The talk is fully illustrated with pictures and lyrics – here by the artist Richard Dadd, who while incarcerated in Bethlehem (Bedlam) hospital in London painted an astonishingly materialized watercolour of Crazy Jane, this half-forgotten star of nineteenth-century song.
‘Sketch for an Idea of Crazy Jane’ by Richard Dadd, Bethlehem Hospital (1855).
