Hunger In Focus: Art, Humanity, and the Call to Act
Grasso-Fauliso Building
Hartford
April 17, 2026
Hunger is an age-old problem, but a novel collaboration is finding new ways to support young artists and help audiences think differently about the issue.
Hunger in Focus is a unique collaboration between local nonprofit End Hunger CT!, the state of Connecticut and its youthful residents. End Hunger CT! asked youth aged 6 through 25 to submit images that represent perspectives on food access and daily life.
I appreciated that the pictures weren’t stereotypical images of poverty. The students had an eye for the ways that humans interact with food– from purchase to preparation to consumption.
Recontextualizing the conversation around hunger through the eyes of youth is a surprising approach, but it makes sense. The images captured exactly what they were seeing. As I scanned the gallery I became interested in what I didn’t see.
Namely, there were no pictures of gardens or people working in the production of food prior to its sale. I’d never thought much about how making food interacts with access to it, despite the obviousness of the connection. There are often conversations about the impact of programs like community gardens, but it’s easy to tout potential impact. Yet when young people present the reality of their interactions with food, it’s only buying and eating.
Would hunger and food insecurity be lessened if young people (or anyone, for that matter) had better means to produce food themselves? There are good public health reasons that we don’t allow food production in neighborhoods all willy nilly, but is there perhaps a middle ground? These were new ideas for me, spurred on by the gallery.
International gallery artist and Hartford’s own Olivia Nguyen, also known by the name Fiyab0mb, was the event's keynote speaker. While she wasn’t directly involved in the photography project, Nguyen spoke about how important it is to encourage young people to pursue the arts. She shared how her immigrant parents initially supported her artistic journey, then became hesitant when she told them that she wanted it to be her career.
“Sometimes that journey is hurtful and sometimes that journey is discouraging, because you don't want to do anything to disappoint your family, but at the same time you don't want to do anything that just doesn't make you happy,” she said.
Her perspective was not simply about the indomitable spirit of the unrestrained artist. Nguyen’s belief in self-realization is really about the responsibility to speak for one’s self and others. Hunger can be a particularly difficult subject to talk about, and she said art is critical to help young people express their feelings.
“Some children are not brave yet and they can't speak yet,” she said. “So they're going to do it in other ways where they're painting, they're creating, they're writing stories, they're rapping with their friends, they're writing poetry.”
The artwork these young people are producing needs an outlet. These small, creative events can both kickstart new thoughts on an old problem, and new artistic careers that can help us imagine new ways to solve them.
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