With its title taken from the William Butler Yeats poem "To Ireland in the Coming Time," A Measured Quietude explored significant themes and characteristics of 20th century Irish visual art. The exhibition provided abstract images by artists concerned with intimate explorations of the medium of drawing.

It featured a large-scale wall piece by Maude Cotter entitled In Absence and composed of cardboard, plaster and steel, as well as the drawings by Colin Darke and Liadin Cooke both juxtaposing texts and images. While Darkes’s drawings are comprised of cigarette papers and covered with minuscule text, referencing a practice well known in Northern Ireland in which prisoners secretly passed letters written on such papers, Cooke’s ink drawings are paired with excerpts from the Marquis de Sade’s writting Juliette.

Also showcased are works by Róisín Lewis that fluctuate between writing and drawing, gouaches by Richard Gorman, watercolors by William McKeown, as well as fragile ink diptychs by Fergus Martin and lyrical drawings by Fionnuala Ni Chiosáin.

In addition, John Kindness, an artist from Northern Ireland, re-created a large-scale wall drawing, produced first in The Drawing Center's Project Room. Entitled "Scenes from the Life of Herakles #2" and executed as a black-and-white fresco painting, the work describes the artist's childhood in Belfast.

A Measured Quietude: Contemporary Irish Drawings was organized by The Drawing Center in New York City as part of that city's Irish Arts Celebration in 1999, which included an exhibition at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, as well as programs at Lincoln Center and New York University's Gluckman Ireland House. The exhibition is supported by grants from the British Council, the Cultural Committee in Ireland and the Fifth Floor Foundation.