Angry artists in petition to keep Great Hunger Museum open
Leading Galway artists and curators are among those campaigning for the immediate re-opening of Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum in Connecticut, USA, which closed in 2020 and is under threat of permanent closure.
The museum, which opened at Quinnipiac University in 2012, houses the world’s largest art exhibition relating to the Great Famine, which devastated Ireland in the mid-19th century. The unique collection includes work by leading contemporary Irish and Irish-American artists, alongside period paintings by key 19th-century Irish figures, including Jack B Yeats.
John Behan, Dorothy Cross, Joe Hogan, Pádraic Reaney, Dean Kelly and Kieran Tuohy, all based in Galway, are among the contemporary artists whose work is in the museum.
The exhibition in Quinnipiac was curated by the Kenny Gallery in Galway City and Kennys have co-ordinated this petition to have it reopened. It has been signed by those artists and others including Hughie O’Donoghue, Alanna O’Kelly, Robert Ballagh John Coll, Rowan Gillespie and Tracy Sweeney all of whom feature in the collection.
The Quinnipiac Great Hunger Museum closed in early 2020 in line with Covid-19 restrictions – but the university authorities have not reopened it since. That’s because they plan to close the institution and relocate its collection.
The first sign of trouble came in 2019 when Quinnipiac University said it was reassessing funding for the museum due to cost-cutting plans. It gave the facility until June 2020 to become self-sufficient. Covid put paid to that.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
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