Art in the Public Realm
Cork City Council's ambition is to make art visible and available to all those who live, work in or visit Cork. We want to create a sense of pride and excitement about our city and to add to its vibrancy.
Cork City Council Arts Office will focus on three areas of work: public art; outdoor festivals, street arts and events; and creative placemaking in our communities. We will build on the strong tradition of outdoor arts in Cork City and capacitate the realisation of memorable arts experiences in the public realm, across all art forms and practices, ensuring environmentally sustainable approaches.
We look forward to contributing to making Cork’s public spaces safe, attractive, and inclusive, for the enjoyment of everyone.
Below are some examples of initiatives delivered by Cork City Council in partnership to further the strategic priority 'Art in the Public Realm' including annual events and art in the public realm projects. Also below is a list of festivals in Cork City. Get in touch if you are involved in an arts festival that you would like to be added to this list.
For more information on this strategic priority, have a look at the Cork City Council Arts Strategy 2022-2026
Cork City Council Arts Strategy
Annual Events
Join us to celebrate the Cork St. Patrick’s Festival as the city comes to life for St. Patrick’s Day Parade on March 17 from 1pm.
Cork St. Patrick's Day Parade takes place in the heart of the city. Join us for a carnival of colour, music, pageantry and fun when over 50 local community groups participate in the city's parade along with visiting groups from overseas and a variety of large scale commissioned pieces.
As part of a wider festival, join us also for music, history and cultural experiences across the city. For full & up-to-date information visit St. Patrick's Festival webpage
Culture Night is an annual all-island public event that celebrates culture, creativity and the arts, which takes place on the 3rd Friday in September annually.
On Culture Night, arts and cultural organisations and venues of all shapes and sizes, including the National Cultural Institutions, extend their opening hours to allow for increased access to the public. Special and unique events and workshops are specifically programmed at participating locations and everything is available free of charge.
For full & up-to-date information visit Culture Night
Experience the festive season on the Grand Parade at the much-loved festival GLOW, A Cork Christmas Celebration. Organised by Cork City Council, the event runs on weekends in the run up to Christmas. Attended by over 160,000 people annually, Bishop Lucey Park invites families to explore a magical bespoke installation, while food and crafts tempt revellers on the Grand Parade. Enjoy seasonal tunes from local groups and take a trip on the giant Ferris Wheel.
The Bishop Lucey Park experience opens on the relevant dates from 4.30pm to 8.30pm. The Christmas Food Markets open from 12noon to 8.30pm and the Ferris Wheel spins every day from 12noon to 9pm right until the end of school holidays. For full & up-to-date information visit Cork Christmas Celebration
Art in the Public Realm
Cork City Council’s vision for Island City: Cork’s Urban Sculpture Trail is to revitalise the city through the commissioning of a trail of five contemporary artworks, integrated in the urban fabric of Cork City.
The artwork commissioned in this stage will be a large-scale digitally mapped moving image artwork projected onto the South Main Street façade of Triskel Christchurch.
See brief below.
Information Coming Soon
Darragh Kane 2021
Evening Echo is a public artwork by New Zealand artist Maddie Leach. It is sited on old gasometer land gifted by Bord Gáis to Cork City Council in the late 1980s. This site was subsequently re-dedicated as Shalom Park in 1989. The park sits in the centre of the old Cork neighbourhood known locally as ‘Jewtown’. This neighbourhood is also home to the National Sculpture Factory.
Evening Echo is an art project generated as an artist’s response to the particularities of place and locality. Now in its thirteenth year, the project continues to gather support from the Cork Hebrew Congregation, Cork City Council, Bord Gáis and its local community.
The project is manifested in a sequence of custom-built lamps, a remote timing system, a highly controlled sense of duration, a list of future dates, an annual announcement in Cork’s Evening Echo newspaper and a promissory agreement. Evening Echo is fleetingly activated on an annual cycle, maintaining a delicate but persistent visibility in the park and re-activating its connection to Cork’s Jewish history. Intended to exist in perpetuity, the project maintains a delicate position between optimism for its future existence and the possibility of its own discontinuance.
This year the last night of Hanukkah is Thursday December 14th and offers the only opportunity to see the tall ‘ninth lamp’ alights until next year. The cycle begins 10 minutes before sunset, which occurs this year at 4.24pm, and continues for 30 minutes after sunset when the ninth lamp is extinguished.
This work of art is a fitting tribute to the Cork Jewish Community who lived nearby in the Shalom Park area of Cork city at the turn of the century. The Hebrew Congregation has since dispersed but is remembered with affection and respect in the local community and city wide.
For further details, follow these links:
maddieleach.net/projects/evening-echo/
Information Coming Soon