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Hunger, Past And Present, Topic Of Bridgeport, Hamden Exhibits

Detail from Mary Giel's installation "Rice is Life" at Housatonic Museum of Art.
Courtesy Housatonic Museum of Art
Detail from Mary Giel’s installation “Rice is Life” at Housatonic Museum of Art.
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Hunger is a dramatically compelling subject but it seems to make its way into the fine arts infrequently. Maybe the specter of abject misery is just too tragic, especially when one considers how avoidable famine usually is. To paraphrase one observer, crop failure may be an act of God, but mass starvation is an act of man.

Two exhibits currently in Connecticut are unusual. One, at a museum dedicated to the 19th-century Irish famine, looks at starvation in the past. Another exhibit looks at hunger in the present.

‘Daniel Macdonald’

During Ireland’s potato blight of 1845-1852, which killed 1 million and forced 2 million to emigrate, Irish artists worked in a market based in London. Almost none depicted the Great Hunger. “They painted during the famine, but not of the famine,” said Grace Brady, director of Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum in Hamden. “Many felt it was improper to paint the famine. There was such shame surrounding it. Their people were so degraded.”

Daniel Macdonald was an exception. In 1847, Macdonald painted a heartbreaking depiction of a family discovering their store of potatoes, which they had stashed carefully, had been destroyed by the fungus. An old couple, a middle-aged man, two young women and a man clutching a toddler stare in shock or hang their heads and weep at the pile of spoiled food. They all know what this means: They probably will all die.

Macdonald’s “An Irish Peasant Family Discovering The Blight” is the only known painting of the famine painted while the famine was still raging. It was created in what is now known as Black 47, the worst year of the tragedy. The Irish cultural rarity is on exhibit now at the museum, as one of an array of drawings and paintings by Macdonald (1820-1853).

Macdonald created respectful depictions of his countrymen during a time when disdain for the Irish was common and disregard for their well-being even moreso. “He came from a Protestant, well-to-do family. … What’s amazing, coming from that background, is that he never painted Catholic Irish peasants in a derogatory or malicious way,” Brady said. “Many painter and illustrators showed them drinking, lazy, with simian faces.”

Other paintings don’t focus on the famine, although some show hardship that seems to predict the catastrophe. The exhibit is called “In the Lion’s Den,” and many works reflect that aura of looming peril. “The Fairy Blast” (1842) shows a village fleeing in terror from a fairy. In Irish lore fairies are evil spirits who replaced good children with bad-tempered “changelings.” Like the potato fungus, they were an invisible threat. “Irish Peasant Children” (1846) shows three kids on a hilltop: a rosy-cheeked, angelic girl, a ratty-haired boy and a girl hanging her head. The girls resemble the two grieving young ladies in “An Irish Peasant Family Discovering The Blight,” painted the next year, and may have been the same models.

Other paintings show a family being kicked out of its home — a common occurrence among the peasantry, who were often evicted to make room for higher-paying tenants — and peasants brewing illegal alcohol, a form of resistance against governmental tyranny.

“This exhibit was an easy choice for this museum. It has themes of colonialism, superstition, desperation and hunger,” Brady said. She stressed the importance of Macdonald in the artistic landscape. “He died at age 32. If he had lived longer, there’d be more talk about him,” she said.

Just after it was painted, “An Irish Peasant Family Discovering The Blight” was exhibited at the British Institution. That society was based in London, the seat of the government that dawdled while its Irish citizens starved. Brady said the Institution respected Macdonald’s talent but the painting’s presence there had little impact. “After it was up, nobody really commented on it,” she said. “They didn’t know how to comment on it.”

‘Rice Is Life’

Mary Giehl said as an artist, she couldn’t show poverty as it truly is. “That’s for photography to do,” Giehl said. Her installation, “Rice of Life,” on exhibit now at the Housatonic Museum of Art in Bridgeport, depicts hunger symbolically.

Giehl made 360 small bowls from rice and water: some bowls are white, some are red, some are black. Using red thread, she hung the bowls from the gallery ceiling 18 bowls deep per row, in a grid pattern whose rows line up with a listing of 20 nations on the far wall, all of which experience high levels of food insecurity: Haiti, Zambia, Central African Republic, Namibia, South Korea, Chad, Zimbabwe, Tajikistan, Madagascar, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Liberia, Rwanda, Congo, Timor-Leste, Afghanistan, Swaziland, Yemen, Uganda and Mozambique.

White bowls symbolize a percentage of that nation’s population that is able to eat regular meals. Red and black bowls symbolize the percentage of food insecurity in that country.

“Rice is what feeds most third-world countries. The countries with the highest rates of malnutrition and hunger depend on rice,” Giehl said.

The threads cascade into jumbled piles on the floor under the bowls. Giehl chose red to symbolize the vascular system — “because we are all interconnected” — and thread to convey delicacy. “Our food system is so fragile, even though we’re all interconnected, and since global warming, it’s getting worse,” she said.

Giehl is especially outraged at the high percent of habitual food insecurity represented by nearby Haiti, the hungriest nation in the western hemisphere, in the ocean south of Florida. “Think about how much food we waste. Why are they the worst? Why can’t we do more?” she said.

In a “think-globally-act-locally” initiative, Giehl will give away the bowls on the last day of the exhibit, March 18. Every person who brings a nonperishable food item into the gallery on that day can choose a bowl and take it home. The food will be given to the Bridgeport Rescue Mission.

In another gallery at the Housatonic is an exhibit by Kim Waale, “Simulacrutopia (again).” The artwork is not about hunger but about how contemporary society increasingly replaces genuine human interaction with nature with artificial experiences designed to simulate natural environments, such as those seen at Disney theme parks.

Waale made her installation with “all-artificial materials” to resemble birds, rocks, plants, reeds, a waterfall, a map of the world. “Encounters with the natural world are diminishing,” Waale said. “If you look at it on a global scale, with climate change in mind, the practice of trying to control the natural world and create safe spaces is really dumb.”

“IN THE LIONS DEN: DANIEL MACDONALD, IRELAND AND EMPIRE” is at Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum at Quinnipiac University, 3011 Whitney Ave. in Hamden, until April 17. ighm.org/.

“RICE IS LIFE” and “SIMULACRUTOPIA (AGAIN)” are at Housatonic Museum of Art, at Housatonic Community College, 900 Lafayette Blvd. in Bridgeport, through March 18. hcc.commnet.edu/artmuseum/.