The absence of cameras in 1845 and the lack of shocking artifacts as are found in Holocaust museums could have hindered Quinnipiac University’s chances of creating a successful Irish potato famine museum.
However, a successful exhibit is what was accomplished according to a New York Times rave review by Sylviane Gold. “In the galleries of Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum we come face to face with what really happened,” she writes
Gold looked closely into the power of the museum’s exhibits, many dating from that long ago period so we are looking at it several steps removed.
“This has the surprising effect of simultaneously softening and sharpening the gruesome facts,” she wrote referring to the multicultural artwork.
The Times noted that the art isn’t difficult to merely look at like a picture from a concentration camp but it’s also difficult to process. “Looking deeper into the art allows one to truly feel the emotion like tension in a small room.”
Lilian Lucy Davidson’s “Burying the child” is described as, “the central figure leaning into his shovel almost as he were still digging potatoes; but it is a straightforward picture of loss.” Davidson, Gold writes, captures the anger, sorrow and reality of the famine with a simple painting.
The Times notes that assigning blame for the famine is impossible but there are many compelling arguments that put major blame on the British Government. The Great Hunger Museum houses artwork that directly blames the British Government.
The Times describes Michael Farrell’s “Black ‘47”as, “a courtroom in which five Irish skeletons emerge from a coffin to accuse Britain, in the reviled person of Charles E. Trevelyan, who ran the government’s disastrously inadequate efforts.”
The museum, the Times notes, is able to depict the reality of the famine and debate that surrounds it.
The Irish potato famine cannot be directly seen but the gravity of the famine sure can be felt.
Great Hunger Museum is located at 3011 Whitney Avenue ,Hamden Connecticut. www.ighm.org.
3 Comments
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Switch to the desktop site to post a comment.Searlit | Feb 16, 2013, 11:12 AM EST
I went to the museum, the first day it opened to the public. It's beauty is a stark contrast to the horror of what happened to the Irish during those black years. Having had great grandparents born in 1844 in Limerick City, I can't, don't want to imagine what horror they had seen. No wonder no-one talked about it. You can't call a potato failure a famine. The rest of the crops were fine and plentiful - the problem being they were shipped to England. That is why people call the starvation of the Irish a genocide.
handsome68 | Feb 16, 2013, 10:49 AM EST
Grosse Ile, a day trip outside Quebec city, has a moving memorial cemetery and exhibit. in Carrick-on-Shannon, Co. Leitrim, is a site which have lying around some of the feeding pots. In Battery Park, New York City, there is the Irish Memorial, where one can meditate. If the stones could weep.
Joe Kelsall | Feb 15, 2013, 10:52 AM EST
A negative attitude!There is absolutelky NO evidence that the Jews wandered for years in the Sinai: Rabbi Wolpe argues that his views are based on the fact that no archeological digs have produced evidence of the Jews wandering the Sinai Desert for forty years, and that excavations in Israel consistently show settlement patterns at variance with the Biblical account of a sudden influx of Jews from Egypt.And, yet,on this myth Palestine was given to the atheist Zionists. The evidence IS overwhelmimg in Ireland. The Workhouses are still standing. Indeed, the roundtower which commemorates WW1 Irish dead at Ypres is made from the stones from Mullingar workhouse. If somebody is suggesting that the evidence is sparse, come and see the areas of Liverpool where the Irish dead were tipped. Liverpool's St Anthony's Church beacame a centre for just throwing the corpses over its walls. The city was called 'The PriestKiller' - 10 in one year. Quinnipiac's University needs some lessons in research. The grisly evidence was shipped to Liverpool and the fittest made it to the USA where they were also unwelcome.