Coming Home: Art and the Great Hunger

18th Jan 2019 - 16th Mar 2019
An tSeaneaglais / The Glassworks

Coming Home: Art and the Great Hunger is an exhibition of artwork from Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum at Quinnipiac University, Connecticut, USA, which has the largest collection of Great Hunger-related art in the world.

Coming Home: Art and the Great Hunger has only be shown in three locations in Ireland: Dublin Castle (March – June 2018); Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre, Skibbereen (20 July – 13 October 2018); and Cultúrlann Uí Chanáin, Derry (January – March 2019).

The exhibition of artworks at Cultúrlann Uí Chanáin, including work by major Irish and Irish American artists of the past 170 years such as Daniel Macdonald, Paul Henry, Jack B. Yeats, William Crozier, Hughie O’Donoghue, Dorothy Cross and Alanna O’Kelly, is accompanied by a rich and diverse programme of concerts, talks, lectures and other events at Cultúrlann Uí Chanáin. These resonate with the history and legacy of the Great Hunger and also amplify the contemporary themes explored in the exhibition. The themes include famine, the politics of food, poverty, displacement of peoples, refugees, emigration, identity, memory and loss.

A major publication, Coming Home: Art and the Great Hunger, related to the collection and its exhibition in Ireland with commissioned essays, full colour illustrations and a foreword by President Michael D. Higgins has also been produced.

This is a unique opportunity for the people of the city and the wider region to experience this art collection in Derry.

The Great Hunger is also a thematic thread running through IMBOLC International Music Festival, our flagship folk and traditional music festival, with performances by Green Fields of America, Declan O’Rourke (“The Chronicles Of The Great Irish Famine”) and Michael Rooney (Famine Suite) and a range of talks, lectures and other famine-related events.

The exhibition and the accompanying programme has caught the imagination of our local communities, festivals and individual artists, and is a major cultural, educational and tourist event worthy of local, national and international interest. We hope that you will participate, learn and enjoy…

Visit this section of the website for more information.

Open Tuesday to Saturday
10 a.m. to 5 p.m.