Committee to Save the Museum plans street art, live music, other festivities to salute institution unexpectedly closed by Quinnipiac University.
The Committee to Save Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum will host a salute to the museum on Saturday, Oct. 30, from 1–5 p.m. on Woodruff Street at Whitney Avenue. The event is free and open to the public.
The committee was created in response to the unexpected decision by the university’s president and board of trustees to permanently close the museum and reportedly give its collection away. The salute is intended to call together a peaceful coalition of voices to save the museum and its collection.
Opened in 2012, Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum was born of a moral vision to continue the visual and artistic remembrance of the Irish Great Hunger of 1845–1852. It contains the world’s largest collection of art related to the Famine and includes works by some of the greatest Irish and Irish American artists of the last 170 years, among them Paul Henry, Jack B. Yeats, Robert Ballagh and Alanna O’Kelly. The museum’s mission is to educate future generations about the Great Hunger and the timeless lessons learned from this terrible human tragedy.
Formed with the support of a coalition of Irish American groups, the Committee to Save Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum is seeking to reverse the board’s decision and reopen the museum, which is located in a Quinnipiac building on Whitney Avenue in Hamden. Should that effort fail, the committee seeks to ensure that the collection remains intact and whole and that it is not broken up and sold for profit by Quinnipiac.
In addition to street art and live music, the Oct. 30 event will feature Irish dancing, food, free treats and family fun activities. Jerry Kristafer, host of WJMJ morning show, will be Master of Ceremonies. Support for the Salute has been expressed by friends in Ireland, including world-renowned author Marita Conlon- McKenna who has donated signed copies of her best-selling Under the Hawthorn Tree, a children’s novel set during the Great Hunger that has been translated into almost 20 languages.
The committee invites all who care to bring a non-perishable food item to the Salute, to be donated to the Keefe Community Center Food Bank in Hamden as a show of support for Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum and all that it represents.
Follow Save Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum on Facebook.
We hope the museum does not close. If it comes to pass that it does close, we pray that the collection will stay intact .
My husband Patrick McGuire is an Irish American. He is a sculptor patrickmcguiresculptor.com he became very interested in his Irish Heritage after hear the Chieftains music in the sixties. Perhaps you might like to view this website?
Several of his pieces are about Ireland’s Great Hunger.
Great Hunger Museum
The American Irish Historical Society building in New York City may be sold. If keeping the collection at Quinnipiac isn’t possible, perhaps it could be moved to the AIHS building, which could save both institutions.
Have you researched the University President’s background and conflicts of interest with all of the different private boards that she sits and is associated with? Could you imagine if she was Irish and decided the future of the Holocaust museum?