Introduction
Although LPs are an obsolete recording medium, their impact on the dissemination of Irish culture in America, especially following the folk music revival of the 1960s, was profound. This exhibition uses album covers to explore another dimension of the phenomenon, graphic art that targeted the Irish American consumer. Produced by labels in Ireland, England and the United States, the illustrations selected for the covers of Irish music records reveal the ways in which such commercial art constructed an image of a nation and its people in American popular culture over the past fifty years.

The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem made their debut here in Greenwich Village in 1956. Following a television appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1961, they signed a major recording contract with Columbia. Quickly the foursome displaced John McCormack and Bing Crosby as the quintessential musical interpreters of Ireland for American audiences. In the process they also introduced a new cue - the Aran sweater - to the visual vocabulary for "Irish." According to Paddy Clancy, "It was a very cold winter and my mother in Ireland read about the snow and the frost in New York. And her three sons were in America. So she knitted three Aran sweaters and she sent them out. We had a Jewish manager, Marty Erlichman. He saw them and said 'That's it. I've been looking for some identifiable costume for you. It's perfect!'"