College Appoints Pioneering Artist

Because the East End has been home to controversial and groundbreaking figures in art from Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning to David Salle and Julian Schnabel, it is fitting that Southampton College has chosen an artistic pioneer to become its second University Professor.

Brian O'Doherty, who creates his art under the name of Patrick Ireland, is a protean figure in the contemporary cultural worlds of art, film, video, television, art criticism, and writing, both fiction and nonfiction.

An early member of the conceptual art movement, he has had more than 40 solo exhibits in this country and Europe since the early 1960s, including at the Brooklyn Museum and the National Museum of American Art in Washington.

Serve As Catalyst

As a University Professor, Mr. O'Doherty will be based at Southampton College but teach at all three campuses of Long Island University. His appointment, like that of the first University Professor, the essayist and public television commentator Roger Rosenblatt, is designed to not only lure potential students but attract more involvement at the college by the extraordinary wealth of artistic and literary talent on the South Fork.

The university's president, David J. Steinberg, said he hoped that Mr. O'Doherty's appointment would "be the catalyst that creates a nationally recognized center for students interested in the fine arts and media, bringing together the artists now on our faculty with other notable artists in this region."

Ex-N.E.A. Director

For 19 years Mr. O'Doherty was the director of film, radio, and television programs at the National Endowment for the Arts. He wrote and directed the documentary "Hopper's Silence," about the artist Edward Hopper, and has written and produced many series about art for television.

Many of the artist's exhibits have involved individual peformances or site-specific installations, such as a huge blue labyrinth at the Elvehjem Museum of Art in Wisconsin and a series of "rope drawings" in which ropes are strung between floor, walls, and ceiling in gridlike formations which dictate the shapes that are then painted on the walls.

Mr. O'Doherty, who was born in the village of Ballaghaderrin in Ireland, adopted his working name in 1972 "until such time as the British military presence is removed from Northern Ireland."

Former Times Critic

He attended medical school at Trinity College, Dublin, and did postgraduate studies in the physiology of perception at Cambridge and Harvard before stepping across to the field of the visual arts.

According to Jan van der Marck of the Detroit Institute of Arts, Mr. O'Doherty "brings a scientific attitude and probing intellect, as well as historic literacy and aesthetic awareness to everything he touches." He praised the artist's "highly original use of codes, electronic and linguistic, to impart concrete information through abstract means."

Mr. O'Doherty was an art critic with The New York Times in the 1960s and editor of Art in America in the early '70s. Since 1969 he has been an adjunct professor at Barnard College, teaching art writing and the art film. His wife, Barbara Novak, is an Altschul Professor of art history at Barnard and Columbia.

Can't Wait

"I'm excited about the students, the staff, and the opportunities at Southampton College," Mr. O'Doherty said.

"Among those opportunities is the wonderful task of bringing the students into contact with the many distinguished artists and filmmakers in the community, which is unparalleled in this country for its concentration of talents," he said. "I cannot wait to join my colleagues in developing the students' potential in the visual arts and film/video, the areas closest to my heart."

Mr. O'Doherty will begin teaching in the fall.