A LANDMARK exhibition celebrating the life and work of artist Billy Hayes opens to the public at the People’s Museum of Limerick this Friday, 6 March, running until Sunday 8 March 2026.
The works on display have been drawn from friends, collaborators and supporters who spent time with Hayes over the years; people who trusted him to capture moments of their lives, or who backed his practice directly. Organisers describe the collection as one “on loan from the lucky ones.”
Hayes, who described himself simply as a “slave to habitual creativity,” worked, in the words of those who knew him, the way some people breathe – instinctively, constantly and without fuss.
His output was characterised by a restless intelligence and a fluency across materials that left peers in quiet admiration.
He moved freely between formats, never privileging one over another, always following the work wherever it needed to go.
The exhibition presents sketches alongside more resolved pieces, experiments alongside finished images, revealing, as the organisers put it, “a mind always in motion.” There is confidence in the work, but also playfulness — the mark of an artist who never made for approval or trend, but on his own uncompromising terms.
Billy Hayes passed away in June 2023 after a short illness, he was probably best known for his iconic black and white pencil drawing of Limerick-born actor Richard Harris.
Billy’s art can be found all over Limerick and beyond, in people’s homes and in public. He lent his gifted eye for detail to bars and hotels, The Outback in Nancy Blakes, Punches Bar, The Whitehouse, The Red Hen, and Tom Collins Bar to name just a few.
Alongside the exhibition, the Billy Hayes Artist Bursary has been established to support a young artist at a formative stage of their practice. The bursary, described as a practical gesture rather than a grand one, offers modest support — whether through materials, time or space — to an emerging artist for whom making is not a choice but a necessity. It honours Hayes’s own way of working: he made in order to live, and lived in order to keep making.
A selection of works will be available for sale during the exhibition.
True: A Celebration of the Work of Billy Hayes is on at the People’s Museum of Limerick, 9-4 daily, until Sunday March 8, 2026. Admission is open to the public.