Early Life
He was born in County Roscommon in 1928. O'Doherty began signing his work under the name "Patrick Ireland" in reaction to the Bloody Sunday killings in Derry in 1972.
A medical graduate of University College Dublin, and Cambridge University, O’Doherty spent a year working in a cancer hospital and, after emigrating to the United States in 1957, conducted medical research at Harvard, before devoting himself full-time to the visual arts. Speaking of his experience after Harvard,
I first spent a year at Harvard when I came in 1957, doing all kinds of research. I got an MSc there, but I didn’t learn much. I switched from all things medical. I auditioned for a job as a television presenter at the Museum of Fine Arts from the Boston public television station, WGBH—TV. I would do a half hour each week from the galleries on the museum collections, also interviews with artists — Marc Chagall, Jacques Lipchitz, Josef Albers, Walter Gropius, among others.He has also served as editor of Art in America and was the on-air art critic for NBC.
Read more about this topic: Brian O'Doherty
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