An Gorta Mór: Selections from Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum Opening Day at The Fairfield University Art Museum

Fairfield University Art Museum Presents An Gorta Mór: Selections from Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum Exhibition

The Fairfield University Art Museum announces an exhibition of artworks selected from the esteemed Collection of Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum opening on April 11, 2025, and on view through August 16, 2025.

The Fairfield University Art Museum is delighted to announce an upcoming exhibition, opening in the Museum’s Walsh Gallery in the Quick Center for the Arts in April 2025. An Gorta Mór: Selections from Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum, organized by guest curator Ryan Mahoney, presents some of the most important works from the collection of Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum. This remarkable collection, formerly housed in Hamden at Quinnipiac University, investigates the Irish Famine of 1845-1852 and its impact through art by some of the most eminent Irish and Irish-American artists of the past 170 years.

The exhibition, which takes its name from the Irish Gaelic phrase for The Great Famine, An Gorta Mór, will include 38 works from the collection of Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum in a variety of media, including painting, sculpture, watercolor, and pastel. The works range from Romanticism to post-modernism and were produced by more than 30 Irish and Irish-American artists. The earliest work in the exhibition is a small landscape painting by James Arthur O’Connor (Irish, 1792-1841) entitled Scene in Connemara from 1828, while the most recent work is a contemporary painting of a potato plant by Robert Ballagh (Irish, born 1943) entitled Roimh-after, from 2017. Two new additions to the collection, watercolors by Alfred Downing Fripp, RWS (Irish, 1822-1895), entitled Irish Mendicants and Galway Family Preparing Food in a Cottage, will also be included.

The artworks in the exhibition serve as a reminder of the many ways in which the Famine (1845-1852) affected Ireland in both the short and long term. Around 1 million people perished in the Famine. More than 2 million emigrated, most to the United States. By 1850, Irish-Americans made up 12% of Connecticut’s population. By 1901, Ireland’s own population was 4.4 million, barely half of what it had been before the crisis began a half-century earlier.

The Irish Great Hunger Museum’s Hamden site shut down in 2020 as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, but soon after Quinnipiac University trustees voted to move the historic collection to Fairfield under the care of the Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum of Fairfield who Quinnipiac has chosen as the future curators of the collection. The new iteration of the Museum hopes to open in Fairfield in 2026-27 at 636 Old Post Road, in the space currently housing Operation Hope. The plan

is to renovate the space to display the collection, with state-of-the-art lighting and sound systems to create an immersive museum.

The executive director of the Fairfield University Museum, Carey Mack Weber shared, “I am so pleased that we could collaborate with our friends and colleagues at the Gaelic-American Club in Fairfield to bring the important artworks in this exhibition out of storage for the community to enjoy while the work is done to create a permanent home for this remarkable collection in downtown Fairfield.”

A wonderful selection of programming has been created to complement the exhibition, including an opening night talk that will illuminate the historical origins of the Great Hunger, presented by Fairfield University Irish Studies Co-Director, and Associate Professor of History William Abbott, PhD; a lecture on the history of the collection by the founding curator Niamh O’Sullivan, PhD, professor emerita of Visual Culture, National College of Art and Design, Ireland; and a family day focused on the theme of “The Luck of the Irish.”

The museum is open to the public, and all programs are free. Registration is requested via Eventbrite (fuam.eventbrite.com).

The Walsh Gallery is located in the Quick Center for the Arts, and is open Tuesday – Saturday 11-4, with special extended hours on Thursdays until 8 p.m.

For more information visit: An Gorta Mór: Selections from Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum.