The Irish Hunger Memorial Walk and Talk May 3 2015

When it opened in 2002, the New York Times called the Irish Hunger Memorial an “unconventional work of public art that strikes a deep emotional chord, sums up its artistic moment for a broad audience and expands the understanding of what a public memorial can be.”

Starting with a guided tour from the artist himself, Brian Tolle, the Irish Hunger Memorial will be the focus of a multi-disciplinary talk that will also discuss the experience of Irish-Americans in New York, the Famine that drove them here, as well as the landscape and flora of Ireland. Brian Tolle will discuss the choices he made in designing a memorial for the Irish Famine and how the work serves as a contemporary monument dedicated to world hunger.

BPCPC staff horticulturist Richard Fariano will show attendees how recreating the look of an abandoned Irish field on a cared for and cultivated plot of land is more difficult than you might suspect. Historian Lynn Rogers will discuss Irish immigration during the Great Hunger and the immigrants’ experience arriving in the New York City of the 19th century.

Dedicated on July 16, 2002, the Irish Hunger Memorial (which takes its name from the Irish term for the famine of 1845-52, An Gorta Mór, “The Great Hunger”) stands on a half-acre site at the corner of Vesey Street and North End Avenue in Battery Park City. The Memorial depicts a rural Irish landscape with an abandoned stone cottage, stone walls, fallow potato fields and the flora of the north Connacht wetlands.