The Consecration of St. Mary’s Popes Quay by James Mahony
Coming Home: Art and the Great Hunger is now on show at Uilinn, the West Cork Arts Centre in Skibbereen in County Cork, an epicentre of the famine. More than 50 artworks from Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum at Quinnipiac University – at Hamden, Connecticut between Boston and New York – are on stunning display. It has been seen by tens of thousands of people at Quinnipiac.
In west Cork the show is accompanied by a diverse programme of performances, talks, lectures and events including artists talks and a reading by Jeremy Irons of The Cummins Letter written by a local JP in 1848 describing the conditions in Reen. Among the artworks is The Consecration of St. Mary’s Popes Quay by James Mahony, the Cork born artist best known for his harrowing depictions of the famine for The Illustrated London News, where he was an artist and reporter. Dublin auctioneers Whyte’s presented a full sized replica of this work to the Dominicans at St. Mary’s, Cork after they were outbid by the American university when it came to auction in 2015.