Twenty Kānaka Artists on Twenty-Five Years of Hawaiian Art

We asked Native Hawaiian artists and luminaries about the artworks shifting Kānaka Maoli art in the 21st century. These are their answers. 

Hero image clockwise from top left: courtesy of Salvage Public, Late Nite Saints, Solomon Enos, and Ualani Davis and Brandon Ng. Graphic by Coby Shimabukuro-Sanchez.

Drew Kahu‘āina Broderick, Billboard I (The sovereignty of the land is perpetuated in righteousness), 2017

Billboard I is a life-size reproduction of a billboard that was installed inside the entrance of the old Sports Authority building in Kaka‘ako … a memory. I saw the piece regularly, when it was a focal point for the nascent Honolulu Biennial, curated by Fumio Nanjo and Ngahiraka Mason, which has now morphed into the Hawai‘i Triennial. At any rate, the piece, Billboard I, has stayed with me. It took me a while to appreciate the juxtaposition of the billboard-sized excerpt of a palm tree next to a reproduction of its source work, the George Carter painting, Death of Captain Cook, 1783, alongside the neon-lit “Vacancy” sign. The witness, the violence, the glowing aftermath of commercialization/commodification of place. For me, its contemporary art at its best — disturbingly provocative, an on-point commentary of the Hawai‘i we live in today.

Maile Meyer is the owner and founder of Native Books and Nā Mea Hawaiʻi.
Interview by Matthew Dekneef

Michael Todd Berland and Christian Novelli, Late Night Saints, 2020

I really respond to work by Hawaiians that isn’t necessarily or literally about Hawaiʻi and being Hawaiian. When I think about the contemporary aesthetic of Hawaiʻi, it’s contained and moved by the industries here, industries that are based on extraction. There’s this push and pull between the use of culture and language and Hawaiian aesthetics as a form of soft power in challenging those industries. But there’s something that resonates with me in obscuring those identifiers, withholding them, and operating in a way that transcends them. Late Nite Saints takes place in the Pacific Northwest. It’s this energy of Oregon, Washington, Cascadia that is completely separated from Hawaiʻi in its essence. But there’s still a grounding in that one of the filmmakers, Michael Todd Berland, is Hawaiian. 

Late Nite Saints to me is an exercise in revealing the absolute and divine through the mundane, something that I want to accomplish in my own practice. I want my art to transcend flesh and pierce the divine through a similar mystic attuning. In one scene, Michael describes a family of raccoons eating garbage outside of the only grocery store as being in their own little personal heaven. In the next scene, Michael and Christian go to the nearby beach and talk about everyone they knew, how they would act if they were there. It all felt mystical and familiar. I want art to be that way here. Sentimental, mystical, and attuned to the sacred without pretense and self-importance.

Nainoa Rosehill is a multidisciplinary artist.
Interview by Eunica Escalante

Joseph Serrao, Noah Serrao, and Nāpali Souza, Salvage Public, 2013

In 2015, we held a casting for a film I produced [Waikiki] at a coworking space, BoxJelly, which at the time also housed an office for Salvage Public. I didn’t know anything about the brand, but I immediately recognized that trapezoid as Lēʻahi. More than being a cool, Ellsworth Kelly-esque Diamond Head logo, it also felt like a CAPTCHA litmus test for Hawaiʻi (especially Honolulu) localness: If you see a trapezoid, you’re not local; if you see Diamond Head, you’re local. That’s how I first encountered Salvage Public as a Hawaiian brand. My favorite experience with the shape, though, was in 2019 while I was donating graphic and web design on Maunakea during the protests of the Thirty Meter Telescope. I saw Ha‘a Keaulana wearing what is now one of my favorite articles of clothing: the upside-down “1893” T-shirt, a reference to the overthrow, with proceeds being sent to the mauna. It’s just a continuation of what they do so well: extremely intelligent graphic design that communicates a lot, but subtly, and is very clear about who it’s speaking to and where.

Nicole Naone is an artist.
Interview by Matthew Dekneef

Cory Kamehanaokalā Holt Taum, Out of Darkness, was born the light…, 2020

I have been to some exhibitions at Aupuni Space with great work, but the facade is a striking piece, in and of itself. For Out of Darkness, was born the light…, the color is very indicative to me of the natural landscape of Hawaiʻi. Hawaiians experience Hawaiʻi in a specific way, and I think one of those ways is through color, so the colors that he uses — this moody, dark, almost-red, dirt-road kind of palette — are my favorite to experience Hawaiʻi. If you’ve ever looked through a photography book on Hawaiʻi — those old school, vintage kinds of feels and textures — that’s what I get from the colors alone. 

To me, Cory’s work is very thoughtful and yet still modern. His pieces, Out of Darkness, was born the light…,  are always multilayered, which is a distinctly Hawaiian approach to art-making. I know Cory as an apprentice of traditional tattoo artist Keone Nunes — a lot of those motifs you’ll see in his work, and as a result they’re not just slapped on, there’s intention. These motifs are passed down and each comes with a special manaʻo behind it. So whatever he knows about them isn’t necessarily for the masses to know, but it’s there. 

He really does impact my own art because I’m able to talk to Cory about the dilemma that comes up with Hawaiian artists: how best to honor tradition, but also keep it alive and moving forward. To me, you want to create a piece that you can see and honor your teachers in, but also have it be in conversation with the here and now. That’s the most important thing to me as a Hawaiian artist, that we kind of have our foot in two worlds all the time, like the Western and the traditional. If you lean more to one side, or lean more towards the other side, then it ends up being something else. But, if you’re able to — and it’s very difficult to do this — marry the two sides, then it’ll become unique in and of itself. What Cory is doing with these murals is creating something that wasn’t there before. It’s always best to honor, as like anything you do, the people that brought you there, and I think he does that successfully.

Noa Gardner is a playwright.
Interview by Mia Anzalone 

Meleanna Meyer, Solomon Enos, Harinani Orme, Kahi Ching, and Al Lagunero, Hawaiʻi Loa Kū Like Kākou, 2011

I met Meleanna Meyer on a project in San Francisco for emerging Indigenous artists. She invited me to be a part of the Hawaiʻi Loa Kū Like Kākou mural. To me, it was cool because it was my first time witnessing a community mural at that scale. It was multi-generational: five master artists, a few alakaʻi, young adults that included myself, and then they had a whole bunch of youth from Hawaiian charter schools. It was just cool to see so many hands create one mural. I think that’s what always inspires me. We almost didn’t want to touch it when we were working on the mural, but it was empowering to be encouraged to be a part of it. That was the first time I saw a mural reveal itself. It was almost like a spiritual thing for me, just making something out of nothing, kind of trusting the process. I had done my own form of murals and one or two community murals prior to that, but this one was just a special experience. It took place in one week and we just got to see day by day how it developed.

I think a lot of times artists can have trouble collaborating together, but that was the magic of the whole thing, seeing everyone in harmony. All of the artists involved were Native Hawaiian, but there was a large support team of all different people. At that point, there wasn’t a piece in the Hawai‘i Convention Center that was from a Hawaiian artist, it was only artists from other places, so that was an important thing to have a monumental piece like that created by Hawaiians. That mural is the pinnacle of what I always strive to reach in my mural art now, and I don’t think I can reach it, because that magic is in the community. It’s from all the hands that go into it.

Cory Kamehanaokalā Holt Taum is a mural artist and cultural practitioner.
Interview by Mia Anzalone

Ualani Davis and Brandon Ng, Ka Holokū, 2011

The holokū featured throughout the photos has this very particular missionary history of the mid-1800s, and albumen printing, the photographic process that they used to capture the images, was the most popular form of photography around the time. So when Brandon Ng first showed me these black-and-white photographs, which he and Ualani created while B.F.A students at UH Mānoa, it felt like they could be from the 1800s, but they also feel like they could be now. 

These images of this woman and her holokū at these really important, resonant, and powerful sites just kept coming back to me at different moments throughout the years. These are also sites that have a lot of meaning for me; Puʻu o Mahuka Heaiu up above Waimea has a big part in my book Clairboyance; Ulupō Heiau has been a very special place for my spouse and me. It’s almost like there’s a residue that stays in the back of your mind when art moves you. It’s like, “Oh my gosh, I thought about this site for a long time, and it wasn’t conscious.”

One of the biggest aspects of my writing and my writing practice is perspective — what shifts my perspective or helps me see something different. These photos are very contemporary, but they also move me to the past in amazing ways that make me consider a reclamation of space for Kānaka Maoli. 

Kristiana Kahaukawila is a writer.
Interview by Eunica Escalante

Nicole Naone, Transitive Venus, 2012

Nicole Naone’s sculptures show the connection and evolution, to me, of contemporary Hawai‘i sculptors. Her exhibition, Mass, consisted of multiple sculptures varying in size. Each sculpture was a section of a larger piece. That body of work feels connected to Modernists of the 1940s and ’50s like Satoru Abe and Tadashi Sato, with an understanding of form and abstraction that’s in conversation with them. One piece that stood out to me is called Transitive Venus. The sculpture appeared to be shrinking, almost to the point of becoming jewelry. The show was presented with a pop sensibility, but there’s way more going on with the art. 

What’s exciting about Naone’s work is that it’s always personal. As Hawaiian artists, we can sometimes feel like we’re always expected or required to create discussions exclusively around contemporary Hawaiian issues, at the expense of our own personal issues, you know? That also applies to global issues. Shape and design are always an element of it, but there are also bold statements about womanhood, motherhood, gender and the body. The work is easy to access because of its beautiful simplicity, but it’s entrenched with layers and questions about these topics, which pose themselves to you the longer you look at them; sculptures that dare to be vulnerable and truthful, not just pretty. Everything matters in her pieces.

Chris Kahunahana is a filmmaker.
Interview by Matthew Dekneef

Maliewai Productions, 20 minute workout [wip], 2023—

20 minute workout is actually part of a larger multi-year project called Revisiting Kealakekua Bay, Reworking the Captain Cook Monument (2018–2025) initiated by Drew Kahuʻāina Broderick as an artist and curator in August 2018. The overall project came about at a time when monuments across the U.S. were being interrogated—their relevance and histories being questioned and revisited. This work is really looking at Kealakekua Bay as an important wahi pana, where there also happens to be this monument commemorating Captain Cook. 

What’s interesting to me about 20 minute workout is that it’s the expression of a group of artists who are both Hawaiian and non-Hawaiian engaging in native and non-native collaboration to counter colonial narratives of exploration, expansion, and discovery, grounding and centering the values and peoples of this place. It’s presented as an instructional workout video, referencing a lot of ’80s visual culture, and uses the Captain Cook monument as not a machine exactly, but kind of reduces it to a backdrop, a parody.

On another level, I like that what you’re also watching is a group of friends working something out together; at the time of the piece’s release, it was also labeled a work-in-progress. They’re engaging Kealakekua Bay, which logistically can only be accessed by boat or by Kaʻawaloa trail, a strenuous cliff hike, with a level of production and intention representing a diversity of experiences, from dance and movement to film and performance. It showcases play, humor, and experimentation, which is a super important part of its collaborative process. It brings a playfulness that critiques the ridiculousness and absurdity of the monument itself and then further disempowers it. To me, that overall collaborative experience represented in the work is key. Addressing these problematic histories is a thing that Hawaiian artists have always done, but it feels particularly charged by the current cultural climate in the U.S. and, by extension, Hawai‘i right now.

Josh Tengan is a Honolulu-based curator.
Interview by Matthew Dekneef

Marques Hanalei Marzan, Peʻahimauliola, 2016

Marques Hanalei Marzan is a fiber artist who works in a variety of materials, whether it’s lau hala or ‘aha (cord braided of coconut husk). I’ve always respected and looked up to Hanalei and his work. Everything he does is so impressive and detailed. He’s one of my favorite living Hawaiian artists. I’ve always been fascinated by his kōkō puʻupuʻu, which is a very finely corded net and traditionally handled by kahu of high rank to carry calabashes or lift things off the ground. They’re made with a certain type of knotting technique that’s made with one consecutive cord — very ornate and very beautiful.

One of my favorite pieces of his is Pe‘ahimauliola, a pe‘ahi, or fan, he created for The Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. He presented it during the highly-publicized repatriation of Kalani‘ōpu‘u’s ‘ahu ‘ula and mahiole, and it was so memorable because not too many people know how to make a pe‘ahi like that in the traditional manner. He also incorporated the design of Kalani‘ōpu‘u’s cape onto it — talk about artistry! I believe that Pe‘ahimauliola is an example of how he’s keeping these traditional Hawaiian art forms alive by making them contemporary — it’s perfectly suited and resonant for this moment in time. What fascinates me is how he was able to let the mea kūpuna, or the objects in the museum, speak to him. To look, figure out, and understand how they were made. That’s the mark of a truly great artisan.

Enoka Phillips is a hulu artist.
Interview by Matthew Dekneef

April 
A.H. Drexel, KŪPAʻA, 2014

I am interested in work that is fearless and challenges. April A.H. Drexel’s work is an unwavering commitment to investigate and research rich concepts and content driven by engagement critical to Kanaka ʻŌiwi time, place, and space. KŪPAʻA, shown as a part of the now defunct Honolulu Museum of Art Spalding House’s 2014 exhibition HI Society, reveals the history of the ʻāina where it was exhibited: Makiki Heights, located in the ahupuaʻa of Waikīkī in the moku of Kona on the island of Oʻahu. I see April’s artistic practice as Kūpaʻa, Noʻiau, Noiʻi, Hoʻopunihei and ʻAʻa. This artwork does not just speak to or contribute to Native Hawaiian art — it speaks to and of Hawaiʻi and all Indigenous communities worldwide.

Kapulani Landgraf is an artist, cultural organizer, and educator.
Interview by Eunica Escalante

Solomon Enos, Polyfantastica, 2006—

Solomon Enos’s vision is so expansive. There are worlds within worlds in his work. Every painting or drawing he creates is an expression of world-building to me because there’s always mo‘olelo within each and they’re often part of a bigger, unfolding series. Polyfantastica exemplifies that through hundreds of intricate pencil drawings that are absolutely transporting in their detail. One illustration that stayed with me is of a Hawaiian figure that’s wearing this intricate shell-encrusted armor. I remember the description mentioning the outerwear being some sort of shell calcium carbonate refurbished from the ocean mixed with bioplastics. He’s like the Hawaiian Da Vinci in that he has visions of literal inventions that could be made or might be made in the future. His depictions of futuristic warriors, navigators, mahi‘ai — to me, they’re like sketches of the future and it constantly feeds me. Later I learned the series is related to a graphic novel-like epic in a PDF that continues this branching narrative of Hawaiian futures.

When I saw Polyfantastica for the first time it gave me permission as an artist to think on these scales. I’ve always been a huge fan of sci-fi, and he’s one of the only visual artists I know that takes the stories, aesthetics, and experiences of being Hawaiian and puts it in the context of speculative fiction; in other words, science fiction that’s really rooted in Hawaiian ways of being. What his work allows is for there to be visualizations of an alternate or parallel or reinterpreted version of a mo‘olelo. To me, that gesture encapsulates the notion of “haʻina ʻia mai ana ka puana,” of the story continuing to be told and evolving, but in Solomon’s case, 40,000 years now. There’s no end to the story. 

Tiare Ribeaux is an artist and filmmaker.
Interview by Matthew Dekneef

Bernice Akamine, KALO, 2016

I just want to mahalo Aunty Bernice Akamine for all the art that she has done prior to her passing. KALO, in particular, is such an impactful piece that’s rooted in a cultural genealogy of resistance; at once, aesthetically pleasing and familiar, but confrontational in a way that not all mea no‘eau always are. 

As an artwork, I’ve engaged with this work in a lot of different spaces; the first time was at Honolulu Museum of Art School in 2016: a collection of 87 kalo-shaped pōhaku with reprints of the Kūʻē petitions forming the stalks and leaves. It’s so visually distinct from any other piece of exhibiting art in a gallery space because all the kalo pieces are on the ground. Experiencing it in person, it’s like walking into a lo‘i. You are very careful with how you move around the pieces. People usually become quiet and introspective when they experience it. Every step you take through the aisles of her installation — the petitions, the kalo, the pōhaku — it makes you lean in like you are picking kalo, or at least, is making you experience kalo in a different way for the first time. You’re leaning in to see if maybe your kupuna’s name is on these leaves. In a way, your interaction with KALO sort of symbolizes you rediscovering yourself. 

Collectively, that interaction also perfectly encapsulates how in the past 10, 15 years more and more people are diving into our Lāhui’s origins, political evolutions, and revolutions of consciousness.

D. Kauwila Mahi is an artist, activist, and archivist.
Interview by Matthew Dekneef

After Oceanic Built Environments Lab and Leong Leong Architecture, Hālau Kūkulu Hawaiʻi: A Home That Builds Multitudes, 2024

The threats of ethnonationalism are in full force. It feels more important than ever to prioritize artist collectives and creative collaborations that bring much-needed intersectional approaches to Native Hawaiian contemporary art. As with expanded notions of citizenship that overflow checkbox demographics, regenerative built environments challenge dominant paradigms of architecture and land use. In turn, they move us towards more caring relationships with one another and Hawaiʻi nei. 

We often wonder about the conservatism of Native Hawaiian art. Does it have to do with the potential repercussions associated with taking risks and making contemporary work that updates our traditions — of being criticized by colleagues, friends, or family, challenged by revered elders, punished by communities, cursed by the gods? Regardless of the reasons, Hālau Kūkulu Hawaiʻi: A Home That Builds Multitudes — a structure that adapts traditional hale and waʻa lashing techniques for contemporary architectural construction — reminds us of the ways in which innovation has been and will always be a part of Native Hawaiian creative practice.

kekahi wahi is a grassroots film initiative led by filmmaker Sancia Miala Shiba Nash and artist Drew K. Broderick.
Interview by Eunica Escalante

Hinaleimoana Wong-Kalu, “Kū Haʻaheo E Kuʻu Hawaiʻi,” 2007

Kumu Hinaleimoana Wong-Kalu composed “Kū Haʻaheo E Kuʻu Hawaiʻi” on September 25, 2007, for her students at the former Hālau Lōkahi Public Charter School. The mele became an anthem, uniting generations of aloha ʻāina around the world. Kumu Hina recalls first seeing the song used at Maunakea in 2014, when kiaʻi opposing the Thirty-Meter Telescope project successfully halted the groundbreaking of the project. The 2019 music video for the mele, produced by ʻŌiwi TV, was inspired by the Maunakea protest movement and evokes the spirit of the iconic 1985 song “We Are The World.” Executive produced by Kanaeokana, the video brings together some of Hawai‘i’s most notable artists and composers. The video beautifully captures the emotion and resilience of the lāhui, showcasing their unwavering strength and deep connection to their nation. The closing line of the song sings, “No ku’u lahui e hā’awi pau a i ola mau.” “For my nation, I give my all so that our legacy lives on.”

Kim Coco Iwamoto is a politician.
Interview by Jasmine Reiko Healy

Ka Papahana Hana Keaka Hawai‘i, Puana, 2024

When I was hired in the Department of Theatre and Dance through Chancellor Hinshaw’s strategic hiring initiative to place Native Hawaiian scholars in departments across the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa campus, I was charged with the task of building the Hawaiian Theatre Program within the department. Puana, our production which premiered at the Kennedy Theatre in the fall of 2024, exemplifies the growth and impact of this program. The production was an artistic collaboration between our program and Kawaihuelani Center for Hawaiian language, which consisted of kumu, current haumāna, and recent graduates from both our programs. Puana featured original mele compositions that transported us in time. We also have original designs by two haumāna from the Hawaiian MFA program, who used the designs for their thesis projects.  

Institutionalizing the study and practice of Hana Keaka ensures the regular staging of Hawaiian-medium productions for our community and provides students the opportunity to train in traditional and contemporary Hawaiian performance forms and participate in original Hana Keaka that reflect and honor the language, traditions, history, and values of Kānaka Maoli. With each production we expand our abilities and elevate the pillars of our artform: mo‘olelo (story, history, narratives), kū‘auhau (ancestral connections), ‘ōlelo (language), and hana no‘eau (artistry). Puana is another link in the legacy that we are building.

Tammy Hailiʻōpua Baker is a playwright, director, scholar, and educator.
Interview by Eunica Escalante

Paradise Cove, We Were Ward, 2017

We Were Ward was a direct response to an act of censorship — a demand by representatives of the Howard Hughes Corporation to remove a series of one-off, hand printed, and altered T-shirts that appropriated the corporate logo of Ward Village, from a site-specific installation organized by PARADISE COVE at a vacant retail space in the former Ward Warehouse. On a now long gone sun-bleached weekend morning during the summer of 2017, just after Ward Warehouse’s permanent shuttering, PARADISE COVE took to the streets for a parodic user-driven “fashion shoot.” Dressed in unauthorized Ward Village wear, participants strolled through the abandoned site of a new village in development.

There is something to be said for folks who push back through creative acts of resistance, especially across contested private and public space. We need less heaviness and more joy! Native Hawaiian contemporary artists work through and respond to a lot of serious issues: militarization, dispossession, and occupation; environmental devastation, cultural desecration, and commercial development; longstanding struggles for dignified housing and gathering rights — the list goes on. What I loved about Honolulu-based artist collective PARADISE COVE (2015–2018), or PC for short, is that they were irreverent, playful, and always found ways to have fun while facilitating temporary experiences that encouraged participants/spectators to think critically about the branding of “Hawaii.”

Drew Kahu‘āina Broderick is an artist, curator, and educator.
Interview by Eunica Escalante

Madelyn Biven & Alec Singer, Floating on Your Grave, 2019

When I think of an artwork that really moved me into new perspectives of art in Hawai‘i, I must recall the collaborative performance by Madelyn Biven and Alec Singer from the group show CONTACT: Acts Of Faith at the Mission Houses in 2019 — a three-channel video projection and live dance performance called Floating on Your Grave. In darkness, Alec projected the enhanced and oversized moving image of Madelyn’s dancing in an 18th-century style mu‘umu‘u. As a symbol of Hawai‘i’s missionary past, the garment can both constrain the sexuality and refine the femininity of the dancer. Ultimately dancing the mu‘umu‘u completely off, Madelyn moves between a restriction and a freedom of her sensuality, while Alec’s projection investigates the stories of spirits on the grounds of the Mission Houses.

On the night of her live performance, Madelyn stood on a short stoop and staircase outside of a Mission House building, the facade’s white exterior bouncing an angelic projected light across its entire surface facing King Street. The garment she dances in hangs too large over her petite frame and as the moving image of her body floating in darkness begins to dance, so does she. The simultaneous performance of her figure on video and in person strikes me to this day as watching a person’s spirit overcome them and belong to a realm beyond. When Madelyn dances the mu’umu’u completely off, she has a flesh toned bodysuit covering her nakedness; this representation left me with an essence of womanly resistance to patriarchy and the Christianizing mission left behind by the relics of the Mission Houses.

This artwork influenced me to collaborate with Alec on my public art project Nu’uanu Streaming in 2024. This projection took the moving image of Nu’uanu stream and projected it from a rooftop across a block of Nu’uanu Avenue to create a top view perspective of the street as a stream. We collaborated to bring the stream’s spirit into the urbanized space to engage with the disconnection our city has to its perennial and vital network of freshwater.

Nanea Lum is an artist.
Interview by Jasmine Reiko Healy

Joy Lehuanani Enomoto, Last Coral Standing, 2013

On first glance, Last Coral Standing has a surface beauty that is simple and yet so complex at the same time — the use of bright and muted colors, how silver permeates, as well how the fan coral’s redness and silver shadow stand out but are placed off-center in the bottom left of the overall piece. The layered blues used to denote an empty ocean or skyscape. In looking more deeply, however, and thinking about composition, color, and placement of the coral, you are struck by how we are bearing witness to the moment of death of a fan coral, the moment when it releases its color and becomes a shadow of itself, leaving behind a thin silver skeleton. From there, you are also struck by how empty the sea/skyscape (could be either, with the fan coral suggesting a tree on land) is, how devoid of all other life, which should be there. In this way, Enomoto captures the beauty and profound loss of a life that is happening throughout our oceans globally as their temperatures rise and are no longer able to support the life of corals, who are essential to all life in the ocean (and therefore, all life on land, as well). This coral’s death is a harbinger of more death to come.

In this print, Enomoto uses kaona to refer to the Kumulipo, a genealogy that recounts how life springs from the beginnings of the universe, and names the ʻākoʻakoʻa, the coral polyp, as the first ancestor to emerge on the earth. As the first ancestor, the ʻākoʻakoʻa should be the most revered, and considered the strongest, the wisest, and the most protected, and yet, as Enomoto points out, they are dying at an alarming rate due to warming oceans and toxic dumping and pollution. This artwork emphasizes a return to our ancestral knowledge and that we fight to kia‘i our lands and waters before it’s too late. It is both a kāhea, a call to action, and a form of art activism. While I wrote an ekphrastic poem inspired by this artwork: “Last Coral Standing,” which was published in my collection ʻĀina Hānau/ Birth Land, the piece also inspires me to use my own creative work to do similar work toward social and environmental justice in Hawaiʻi and beyond.  

This artwork firmly plants Native Hawaiian art in the 21st century as needing to be deeply engaged in both ʻāina and social and environmental justice and activism, as much of Enomoto’s works do. So much about our colonial situation — especially with militarism and tourism — has meant ongoing ecocide and genocide via issues related to land dispossession and disconnection, poverty, and the exorbitantly high cost of living.  Works like this compel us to return to our connections to ʻāina and to our kūpuna before it’s too late, to demand that having clean kai and wai (not “cleaned out” kai and wai) is of the utmost importance.

Brandy Nālani McDougal is an author, poet, educator, and literary activist.
Interview by Jasmine Reiko Healy

Kealopiko, Moananuiākea Design, 2024

The reason why co-founder and lead designer of Kealopiko and co-founder of Waiwai Collective Jamie Makasobe came to mind is because she’s a wahine Native Hawaiian wahine artist that blends ancestral consciousness and place-based relevance with contemporary ideas. I think what she does and creates is extraordinary because she takes these really sacred ideas, esoteric at times, and places them into a wearable art form that’s accessible and relatable to anyone in Hawaiʻi. That’s important because if we as a Hawaiʻi community feel like our ways of knowing, our connection to place, to family, to tradition is important, and it’s something that is worthy of being perpetuated and protected and safeguarded, then we need to make art forms super accessible to the everyday person.

Jamie and I are connected through our kuleana to the Hawaiian voyaging canoes — as crew members of the Makaliʻi voyaging canoe and Nā Kālai Waʻa — we were preparing back in 2023 to host our canoe families from around the Pacific for the 13th Festival of Pacific Arts & Culture in 2024. In prepping for that, she did a piece on Moananuiākea: Ocean of Connection. Epeli Hauʻofa, a Tongan and Papuan scholar describes Oceania as a vast entity that connects its many islands and peoples rather than a body of water that separates us; so, Moananuiākea has so many layers to it, but ultimately it’s we who belong to the ocean, and therefore as island people, we belong to one another. We have a responsibility to one another, and therefore our collective responsibility is to assure that we are in continuous relationship with our waters, our lands, our oceans, so that we can continue to protect the ancestral sources. It’s that sparking of consciousness that Kealopiko aims to do in its pieces.

We don’t just wear garments for fashion expression. We also wear garments for ceremonial purposes, for protection, for healing, as well, so those are the kinds of elements that Jamie and her partners bring to all of their pieces. Jamie’s artistry is fully informed by her cultural practice blended with contemporary ideas, as well as expressions, but rooted in these cultural practices of Hawaiʻi. And again, it’s that ancestral consciousness — yes, there’s newness, but it’s really trying to amplify a deeper knowing within ourselves, so that when we wear these patterns, when we wear and adorn ourselves and loved ones with these textiles, when we connect with these moʻolelo, we know that this is all part of our legacy of interconnectedness and we just have to tap into it. Jamie’s art emerges from these legacies — it’s like an open invitation.

Mahinapoepoe Paishon is a social impact entrepreneur.
Interview by Mia Anzalone

Imaikalani Kalahele, The Coming of the Gods, 2009

I love all of Imai’s pieces, but I think this piece, The Coming of the Gods, in Bishop Museum’s Hawaiian Hall, speaks to a broader scope of what he does. It’s an acrylic painting on the back wall plus a sculpture in front of it. I love his birds because they’re soaring, they’re uplifting, they’re moving. The way he treats his color and brushstrokes — it looks like a bigger form, but when you look in detail, it’s really made up of light strokes. It looks like it’s falling. And I love his sculpture in the front; he’s doing an old method of twining. You know like we do ʻieʻie baskets? But he’s doing the sculpture form with it, and he’s also included his own hair in it. For him, to project himself into the future, it’s sort of like his DNA is in his art piece, which is really great. I don’t think he pre-plans exactly the shape [of the sculpture], he just allows a piece to become, which I really love because as Native Hawaiians we always say we honor our ancestors and knowledge comes from our kūpuna, but sometimes, do we allow those inspirations to come into our work without pre-meditating and being so direct about it. 

He’s taking the old foundation — the twining and the sculpture — then placing it within a very contemporary way of presenting it. I think that’s one of our struggles with contemporary Hawaiian art, or Hawaiian art, for people to understand. Because everyone thinks Hawaiian art has to be old things, has to be artifacts, but we’re really not about that. This allows that to all emerge into one, that we are present, we are all alive, we are working, and that’s what this piece does because it brings two things in one focus. 

Maile Andrade is an artist and retired professor.
Interview by Mia Anzalone