The Royal Ulster Academy has not kept pace with currents in contemporary art practice, but this year there are signs of change, argues Brian McAvara
The Royal Ulster Academy (RUA) will open the doors to its Annual Exhibition on 19 September; this year the event is being held in the former drawing offices of Harland and Wolff in the rather ominously named Titanic Quarter. The RUA has existed, in one form or another, for almost one hundred and thirty years but, unlike the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA) in Dublin, has been most reluctant to move with the times. In 1981 Martin Anglesea achieved a remarkable feat of writing a history of the organisation which managed to be readable, despite the fact that it chronicled a society which, by the 1920s ‘involved ladies of leisure and hardworking commercial artists as well as teachers and the occasional portrait painter’, a description which was to remain current for a remarkably long period of time
