Collaborating in Conflict: The Yeats Family and the Public Arts
In the Daley Family and Monan Galleries | February 1–May 31, 2026
Examining the extraordinary impact the talented Yeats family had on cultural life and the public arts in Ireland during a century crucial to its history, the exhibition features over two hundred works from premier public and private collections. Paintings, drawings, prints, embroideries, books, and letters by patriarch John Butler Yeats and his children William, Lily, Elizabeth, and Jack, as well as William’s daughter, Anne, highlight examples of individual artistry. They also demonstrate how the Yeats family’s artistic expression was varied and deeply collaborative. In illustrated poetry, set designs, embroideries for home and liturgical use, printed broadsides, paintings, sketchbooks, and other media, the siblings drew upon each others’ acumen. These endeavors were often fraught with conflict, resulting in creative tensions and financial hardships.
The exhibition opens by exploring portraiture of family members and representations of the places that were important to them. It moves on to objects illustrating the family’s engagement with youth as a site of education, entertainment, and memory. Subsequent sections reveal how the Yeatses created objects that transformed private spaces through imaginative innovation and material practices, as well as how they shaped public life through theater, publishing and printing, and visual representations of a distinctive Irish identity as the nation established itself post-independence.
Recent gifts to Boston College anchor the exhibition: Jack B. Yeats paintings and Lily Yeats Stations of the Cross embroideries received by the McMullen Museum and additional acquisitions of Yeats family materials by the John J. Burns Library. These are complemented by major loans from the Model, home of the Niland Collection, the National Gallery of Ireland, the National Library of Ireland, the Library of Trinity College Dublin, the O’Brien Collection, and the Collection of Carolyn A. and Peter S. Lynch. Supplemented by additional loans from other collections and anonymous lenders, the exhibition constitutes the most expansive exploration of the Yeats family’s contributions to the public arts to date. Many objects are publicly displayed for the first time, others for the first time outside Ireland.
The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, edited by Marjorie Howes, which includes fifteen essays contributed by an interdisciplinary team of scholars who offer new insights into historical contexts and interpretive frameworks for studying the Yeatses.
Organized by the McMullen Museum in conjunction with the John J. Burns Library, Collaborating in Conflict has been curated by Marjorie Howes, Christian Dupont, and Diana Larsen. The exhibition is underwritten by Boston College with major support from the Patrons of the McMullen Museum, the John C. Donohue Estate, Robert ’63 and Ann Marie Reardon P’91, and the Anna Frances Vegkeley Ryan Estate in memory of John Anthony Ryan Jr. ’50. Additional support has been provided by William J. Lundregan III, Esq., ’62, JD’67, P’93, ’96 and Elaine Stein-Cummins in memory of Daniel Cummins ’58.