Irrelevant

Irrelevant is one installment of three concurrent solo exhibitions by the visual artist Joe McDonough.

Spread over his home state of North Carolina the linked exhibitions run simultaneously in the towns of Carrboro, Cary, and Greensboro, NC during July 2025.

Individual artworks are untitled as they are open to interpretation.

The name of the three-part solo exhibition is a tongue-in-cheek statement/question concerning the relevance of visual art, painting, self-expressive creativity, and non-representational abstraction during a pivotal period of intense political division, stark inequality, and escalating climate change.

Joe McDonough is an artist, author, musician, comedian, and second-year MFA fiction candidate at The University of Mississippi's 3-year graduate creative writing program.

Earning his BFA in sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design, he also studied literature at Brown University, studio and conceptual art at the Maryland Institute College of Art and the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, and has exhibited performance and visual artwork in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Miami, among other places.  

He has additionally studied improvisational performance at The Second City Training Center in Chicago, and comedic sketch writing at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre in Los Angeles, as well as dramatic acting at Anthony Meindl's Actor's Workshop in Los Angeles.

His fiction has been published by Cornell University's literary journal EPOCH, was selected by judge Karen Russell as one of nine finalists among 2,200 entries for the 2012 Zoetrope: All-Story Short Fiction Contest, and was listed out of 1,468 entries for the 2019 Fish Publishing Short Story Prize judged by Colum McCann.

Born and raised in Durham, North Carolina, Joe currently lives and works in Oxford, Mississippi.