1976: The Way We Were

This exhibition sets the scene for Ashes to Fashion, our most recent exhibition, by re-creating an imaginary visit to the Ulster Museum art galleries in 1976, the year of the Malone House fire. Included are a number of works acquired just before the fire together with Marcel Maeyer’s Fair Tent 11, one of the first works acquired in its aftermath.

The Ulster Museum collection of twentieth century art is of outstanding international importance. Begun in the 1920s, subsequent curators, most notably Anne Crookshank who was Keeper of Art from 1957-1965, developed this area of the collection with a series of ambitious acquisitions. Collecting the Contemporary emerged as the dominant theme of the art collection, and this continues to the present day.

In 1976: The Way We Were the work of local artists, such as William Conor, John Luke and Basil Blackshaw, appears alongside some of the most important international post-war art in the collection. It is this interaction between the historic and the contemporary, and the local and the international, that has come to define the Ulster Museum art collection.

1976: The Way We Were is now open in Art Gallery 5. No booking needed. 

Image Credits: Peter Phillips (1939-2025) British, Mosaikbild 6 x 1, 1975, Acrylic on canvas, BELUM.U2414, Purchased 1976, © The Estate of Peter Phillips