Douglas Hyde Gallery

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The Douglas Hyde Gallery located in Trinity College, Dublin is a contemporary art gallery which hosts and curates temporary exhibition of visual art.

The Douglas Hyde gallery was opened in 1978 in a purpose built space. In 2001 a store room was converted into a second, much smaller gallery. The gallery is jointly funded by the Arts Council and Trinity College, Dublin and its exhibition policy consciously tries to place it at the vangaurd of artistic exploration. The gallery was initially run by a volunteer committee comprising students and staff of the College, led by Professor George Dawson of the Genetics Department. They hosted exhibitions in the now Berkeley Library before finally acquiring the current space. In the early days, when it was one of the few exhibition spaces in Dublin, it showed an eclectic mix of historical shows, craft-based work, and retrospectives of leading Irish artists. As the Dublin art world developed, the Hyde began focussing on contemporary art, intermixing Irish artists work with leading international artists. However, it now rarely shows work by Irish artists, a marked departure from those earlier policies.