By JON RECHTMAN (Aug. 15, 2005) – Though D.C. Central Kitchen provides hundreds of meals a day to those living in poverty and homelessness, it now has an artistic reminder that there are still people that their food does not reach.
The Congressional Hunger Center recently unveiled “Hunger Exists Here,” a mural depicting hunger in America, on the walls of D.C. Central.
The mural – which was pained on Friday, July 29th at Union Station and Saturday, July 30th at Eastern Market – was an interactive, participatory art project in which community members were invited to contribute thoughts, feelings, and quotations on poverty and hunger.
“If anything, this mural helps elevate and amplify voices,” said Xavier Cortada, the artist, voices that have something powerful, but don’t necessarily have a vehicle to say it with.
The mural features approximately 600 quotations from passerby, local residents, persons living in poverty, and prominent community leaders, including several U.S. senators. The quotations are in many different languages and from many different perspectives and offer a textual mosaic of America’s attitude toward hunger.
The mural depicts various people (homeless men, single mothers, immigrant families, and others) with hungry looks in their eyes and empty plates in their hands. America’s “amber waves of grain” wind like ribbons behind them in the background, beautiful but out of reach. The hungry people in the picture are “floating and disconnected,” Cortada explained. “[The problem] are the barriers – barriers to food stamps, to social services, to health care and to housing, and the fear and shame of being hungry.”
The project was coordinated by the Congressional Hunger Center’s Emerson National Hunger Fellows, a group of 24 post-graduate students who have spent the last year working in direct service organizations in communities around the country and public policy organizations in Washington. The mural is serving as their final project before graduation, and will be permanently installed at the D.C. Central Kitchen. The Fellows asked Cortada, who has painted murals for the White House, the World Bank, and the Department of Transportation, to help them capture the anguish of the nation’s hungry.
For Cortada, this project will also act as a time capsule of sorts, a reminder to future (and hopefully better-fed) generations that hunger was a very real and very painful reality here in America.
It may be in a decade, or in a century, or in a millennium, but we will eventually all care for each other and eliminate hunger,” Cortada prophesized. “And we’ll need a record of where we were now, in 2005.”
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