In 2013, Ghada Amer was invited by the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art to take part in the exhibit "Earth Matters: Land as Material and Metaphor" by creating an earthwork in the Smithsonian’s gardens. Choosing famine as her subject, Amer stenciled the word "hunger" into the ground, filling the letters with rice. Over the summer months, the tufts grew into tall plants, and the edible rice began to emerge, obscuring the stenciled text. The letters showed themselves again once the crop was harvested at the end of summer. Amer sought to call out a worldwide problem of hunger, and specifically to point to her native Egypt where politicians hand out bags of rice in exchange for votes.