The story of Hawaiian art begins not in galleries or royal courts but in quarries, forests, and shorelines, where the first settlers of the islands transformed volcanic matter, plant fibers, and marine shells into objects of use and meaning. Archaeological sites such as the Mauna Kea adze quarries on Hawaiʻi Island, one of the largest known stone quarries in Polynesia, reveal just how central these materials were to early artistry. To trace their emergence is to enter a world where artistry was inseparable from survival, and where even the humblest fiber cordage could bear echoes of cosmic order.
The volcanic palette
Few places on earth dictate artistic material as strongly as Hawaiʻi. Basalt from Mauna Kea was quarried in massive amounts; archaeologists have uncovered thousands of unfinished adze blades left at the site, testimony to a system of specialized production. These adzes shaped the wood for houses, canoes, and images of gods. Their polished surfaces, sometimes left gleaming black, were admired not only for function but for refinement.
Other materials added to this volcanic palette. At Puʻuhonua o Hōnaunau National Historical Park on Hawaiʻi Island, excavations have uncovered coral tools used for smoothing and shaping wood, as well as shell scrapers for daily work. Such items may appear simple, but their carefully selected forms and textures reveal an eye for balance and harmony. The islands, in this sense, were their own atelier.
Kapa and cordage
If stone gave form, plants gave texture. The production of kapa cloth, made from the inner bark of the wauke tree, was one of the most refined textile traditions in Polynesia. Wooden beaters known as iʻe kuku, often found in archaeological sites on Oʻahu and Kauaʻi, were carved with distinctive grooves that impressed subtle watermark patterns into the cloth. Surviving kapa pieces in the collections of the Bishop Museum in Honolulu display vibrant dyes—reds from ʻukiʻuki berries, yellows from turmeric, browns from kukui bark.
Cordage, made from olona or coconut husk, had both practical and aesthetic value. The lashings that held canoes together, examples of which are preserved at the Bishop Museum, were so finely executed that their strength astonished European visitors. The making of fishing nets, with their even knots and balanced meshes, was considered an art of precision as much as a craft of necessity.
Sacred versus ordinary
The line between sacred and ordinary was never fixed. At Puʻukoholā Heiau, built by Kamehameha I in the late eighteenth century but rooted in earlier traditions, tools and cordage were consecrated in rituals that linked material labor with divine sanction. An adze used to fell a sacred tree for a canoe could also become a treasured heirloom, passed down with stories of its ritual use.
The process of quarrying stone or beating kapa was often accompanied by chants, some of which have survived in nineteenth-century collections of Hawaiian mele. These chants remind us that making was itself a form of prayer, binding the object to unseen forces. Beauty was not a separate category but part of this fusion of material, function, and spirit.
Woodcarving and the Sacred Image
If stone and fiber anchored the practical arts of Hawaiʻi, wood became the medium through which the sacred took shape. Hawaiian forests supplied not only canoes and houses but also images of gods, altars, and temple structures. In the skilled hands of carvers, trees such as koa and ʻohiʻa were transformed into figures of striking intensity—objects not meant for detached contemplation but for active participation in the spiritual and political life of the islands. Some of the finest surviving examples can be seen today at the Bishop Museum in Honolulu and at Puʻuhonua o Hōnaunau National Historical Park, where rows of ki‘i stand sentinel along the sea.
Ki‘i figures
The most emblematic of Hawaiian woodcarving traditions are the ki‘i, images embodying deities and ancestors. Carved in both small and monumental scales, these figures bore fierce expressions, open mouths, and tense limbs. At Puʻuhonua o Hōnaunau, restored ki‘i guard the reconstructed heiau, their carved visages echoing the powerful forms described in early accounts by explorers like Captain James Cook’s artist John Webber, who sketched Hawaiian religious figures during his 1779 voyage.
Unlike the intricate pattern-heavy carvings of the Marquesas or the spirals of Māori art, Hawaiian ki‘i emphasize mass and presence. Inlaid shell eyes, still visible on some figures, heightened their vitality, making them seem to gaze directly at worshippers. These figures were not inert sculptures but presences activated in ritual.
Temple architecture
Woodcarving extended beyond figures into the architecture of sacred sites. At Puʻukoholā Heiau, constructed under Kamehameha I in the late eighteenth century, wooden posts once lined the terraces, each carved to embody divine guardianship. Earlier structures, such as those at Wailua on Kauaʻi, also featured elaborate wooden images integrated into stone platforms.
The construction of these temples was itself an artistic act, blending the permanence of stone with the vitality of carved wood. Oral traditions record the rituals surrounding tree selection and felling—chants, offerings, and taboos that transformed the work of carving into a ceremonial collaboration between humans and gods.
A culture of scale
Hawaiian carvers did not hesitate to work on a monumental scale. Some ki‘i reached over ten feet in height, dominating temple courtyards. At Hale o Keawe, the ancestral shrine at Hōnaunau, large carved figures once surrounded the structure, signaling both spiritual power and chiefly authority.
Yet alongside these monumental works, smaller carvings of family gods, or ‘aumākua, circulated within households. These portable figures, sometimes carried on journeys, remind us that woodcarving was not confined to the great heiau but permeated daily life. In both intimate and public contexts, scale was a language of power: the towering ki‘i magnified the authority of chiefs, while the smaller figures reinforced the personal bonds between families and their ancestral guardians.
Feathers, Prestige, and Political Aesthetics
Among the most dazzling achievements of Hawaiian artistry were works made not of stone or wood but of feathers. To European visitors such as Captain James Cook in 1779, the sight of chiefs adorned in feathered cloaks and helmets was astonishing; to Hawaiians, these garments were visible declarations of lineage, status, and divine favor. Surviving examples in the British Museum, the Bishop Museum, and the Peabody Essex Museum in Massachusetts testify to their brilliance. These creations represented a level of ecological knowledge and craft so advanced that they remain masterpieces of both art and politics.
‘Ahu‘ula and mahiole
The feathered cloak, or ʻahuʻula, was the most prestigious garment of Hawaiian nobility. A celebrated example once worn by Kamehameha I is preserved today at the Bishop Museum, its glowing red and yellow surface woven from the feathers of thousands of ʻiʻiwi and ʻōʻō birds. The cloak given by Hawaiian chiefs to Captain Cook, now in the British Museum, illustrates how these works also served as diplomatic gifts.
The matching feathered helmet, or mahiole, completed the regalia of chiefs. The mahiole associated with Kamehameha the Great, also housed at the Bishop Museum, features bold red crests that amplified his presence in both ceremony and battle. Constructed over a basketry base of olona fiber, these helmets combined engineering strength with dazzling surface. Cloak and helmet together transformed a chief into a living embodiment of authority.
The bird catchers’ art
Behind the brilliance of featherwork were the kia manu, or bird catchers, whose ecological knowledge was as refined as their skill. Working in forests such as those on Haleakalā, Maui, they spread sticky sap from breadfruit trees onto branches, patiently waiting for birds to land. From each ʻōʻō or mamo bird, only a few feathers were plucked before the bird was released, ensuring sustainability.
The scarcity of certain colors elevated their value. The deep yellow feathers of the now-extinct mamo were so rare that they appeared only in small triangular patches on cloaks reserved for the highest-ranking chiefs. The bird catchers thus shaped the visual vocabulary of power: their patience and expertise determined the palette that chiefs displayed.
Visibility of power
Featherwork was not merely adornment—it was political theater. Chiefs donned ʻahuʻula and mahiole during ceremonies, councils, and warfare. The brightness of these garments made leaders instantly visible, reinforcing hierarchy and inspiring loyalty. When King Kalākaua revived traditional ceremonies in the late nineteenth century, featherwork was once again paraded as a symbol of continuity with ancestral authority.
The gifting of featherwork also played a role in diplomacy. Cloaks presented to foreign rulers—including one to King George III of Britain—projected Hawaiʻi as a sovereign kingdom with a culture equal in refinement to any in Europe. These exchanges remind us that featherwork was both art and international language, carrying Hawaiian prestige across oceans.
The Arts of Navigation and Performance
If feathered cloaks illuminated Hawaiian chiefs with radiant splendor, the canoe and the dance revealed the artistry of the people as a whole. Navigation, chant, and hula were not ornamental sidelines to daily life but the skills that sustained communities, carried them across vast seas, and bound memory into rhythm. These arts demonstrate that Hawaiian creativity was never limited to static objects; it thrived in motion, sound, and performance, where knowledge was carried as much in bodies as in materials.
Canoe building
No artifact of Hawaiian culture symbolizes ingenuity more than the canoe. Evidence of canoe workshops survives in places such as Kealakekua Bay on Hawaiʻi Island, where tree trunks were felled and shaped into sleek hulls. The great koa forests of Hāmākua and Hilo supplied the timber. Carvers used basalt adzes quarried at Mauna Kea to shape the hulls, then lashed the pieces together with olona cordage so strong it astonished European observers.
Double-hulled voyaging canoes, or waʻa kaulua, were capable of crossing hundreds of miles of open ocean. Oral traditions preserve the names of famous vessels, such as the ʻŌpelu, linked to voyages between Hawaiʻi and other islands of Polynesia. In modern times, the launch of Hōkūleʻa in 1975 by the Polynesian Voyaging Society, co-founded by artist and navigator Herb Kawainui Kāne, revitalized these traditions. Its successful journeys across the Pacific proved the enduring brilliance of Hawaiian navigation and canoe artistry.
Hula as embodied art
If canoes carried bodies across distance, hula carried knowledge across generations. Far more than dance, hula was a complete performance art, uniting chant (mele), gesture, and costume. The hālau, or hula school, was the institution where this art was preserved and transmitted. Leaders such as ʻIolani Luahine, sometimes called the “high priestess of hula,” devoted their lives to keeping the tradition intact in the twentieth century, bridging ancestral practice with modern performance.
The Merrie Monarch Festival, founded in Hilo in 1963 and named after King David Kalākaua, who had revived hula at court in the nineteenth century, became the central stage of this revival. There, costumes of ti-leaf skirts, kukui-nut adornments, and feathered kāhili reappeared in their sacred forms, replacing the artificial costumes of tourist shows. The festival transformed hula from marginalized entertainment back into an honored art.
Oral imagery
The art of words was inseparable from these performances. Hawaiian mele and chant, preserved in nineteenth-century collections such as David Malo’s Hawaiian Antiquities (1838), reveal the richness of oral imagery. A chief might be described as a shark cleaving through waves, or rain might be evoked by naming the exact valley where its pattern was known.
Chants were performed at heiau such as Wailua Complex on Kauaʻi, embedding landscape directly into poetry. Modern practitioners, including chanters like John Keola Lake, carried this tradition into the twentieth century, ensuring that the imagery of rain, sea, and genealogy survived beyond suppression.
First Contact, First Sketches: The Eighteenth Century
When the ships of Captain James Cook appeared on Hawaiian horizons in 1778, they brought not only foreign sailors and unfamiliar technologies but also artists tasked with recording the new worlds they encountered. Their sketches and watercolors mark the earliest surviving depictions of Hawaiians by outsiders. These first images, though invaluable, were never neutral—they reveal both fascination and distortion, setting the stage for centuries of Hawaiian art shaped in dialogue with foreign eyes.
Western eyes recording
Cook’s third voyage included John Webber, the expedition’s official artist. Webber sketched Hawaiian chiefs draped in feathered cloaks, dancers mid-motion, and landscapes dotted with canoes. His watercolor of Kea Laʻea Bay, Kauaʻi, where Cook first anchored, captures palm-lined shores in picturesque style. Chiefs are posed with the composure of European nobility, while commoners appear as pastoral figures—choices that reflect both careful observation and European expectations.
Other crew members also drew scenes. William Ellis, an assistant artist, left sketches of hula performances and daily life. These works circulated back in London in the form of engravings, giving Europeans their first visual impressions of Hawaiʻi. Yet the framing often recast Hawaiians into classical archetypes: heroic, rustic, or exotic, depending on the audience.
Misunderstandings in depiction
While Webber’s drawings remain treasured records, they also reveal misunderstandings. His rendering of feather cloaks often exaggerated their bulk, making them resemble European theater costumes. Hula dancers were sketched in graceful but inaccurate poses, stripped of the grounded, rhythmic movements that define the dance. In his landscapes, sacred sites such as heiau at Kealakekua Bay were reduced to picturesque ruins, their ritual significance ignored.
These distortions were not malicious but products of training. European artists saw through the lens of academies in London and Paris, not Hawaiian ritual. A ki‘i was treated as sculpture, not as an inhabited god. A canoe was rendered for symmetry of line, not as the culmination of ceremony and skill.
The Hawaiian gaze back
Hawaiians, however, were not passive subjects. Chiefs quickly understood the power of portraiture. Kamehameha I, who consolidated the islands after Cook’s visit, later commissioned likenesses that blended Western realism with Hawaiian regalia. His successors, including King Kamehameha III and Queen Kaʻahumanu, sat for foreign painters, ensuring that their images circulated both locally and abroad.
The exchange of feather cloaks was itself a calculated performance. Cook received one of the most resplendent ʻahuʻula from Hawaiian chiefs at Kealakekua, now housed in the British Museum. Such a gift was not a concession to European curiosity but a diplomatic gesture, presenting the most esteemed Hawaiian art as a token of rank and sovereignty.
Even everyday adaptations reflected agency. Hawaiian artisans began incorporating iron nails and tools acquired from Cook’s crew into woodcarving and canoe-making, achieving sharper precision. What Europeans saw as souvenirs or curiosities, Hawaiians saw as new resources for creativity.
Missionary Influence and the Arrival of Literacy
The arrival of the American Protestant missionaries in 1820 marked a turning point in Hawaiian cultural life. Landing first at Kailua-Kona on Hawaiʻi Island, the missionaries brought with them printing presses, hymnals, and architectural plans, but also prohibitions that reshaped long-standing traditions. Their efforts led to the creation of a Hawaiian alphabet and the first Hawaiian-language newspapers, but they also suppressed sacred dance and image-making. Out of this clash emerged a hybrid culture where Hawaiian creativity adapted to new forms.
Alphabet and scripture
With the collaboration of Hawaiian chiefs and scholars—including King Liholiho (Kamehameha II), who permitted the missionaries to teach, and later Kauikeaouli (Kamehameha III), who strongly supported literacy—a written alphabet for Hawaiian was devised in 1826. The first Hawaiian-language printing press, set up in Honolulu, produced primers, gospels, and later hymnals.
One of the most influential figures in this process was ʻŌpūkahaʻia (Henry Obookiah), a Hawaiian who had studied in New England before his early death in 1818. His story inspired the missionary effort, and his vision of literacy as a path for Hawaiians informed the work that followed. By the mid-nineteenth century, Hawaiʻi had some of the highest literacy rates in the world, with thousands reading Hawaiian-language newspapers such as Ka Lama Hawaiʻi (first printed at Lahainaluna Seminary on Maui in 1834).
Music also changed. Hymns translated into Hawaiian were sung in schools and churches, but their melodies were adapted to Hawaiian vocal traditions. This gave rise to choral practices still heard in congregations today.
Religious suppression of Hawaiian forms
Missionary fervor was not limited to literacy. Leaders such as Queen Kaʻahumanu, after her conversion to Christianity, banned hula in 1830, calling it incompatible with the new faith. Wooden ki‘i were burned, and many heiau fell into disuse or were dismantled. Missionaries, influenced by their Puritan backgrounds, advocated plain church interiors and European dress, rejecting the vibrant adornment of Hawaiian regalia.
This suppression struck at the heart of Hawaiian artistry. Hula, once central to ritual and genealogy, was forced underground, practiced quietly in rural areas despite prohibitions. Featherwork and carving ceased to be created for sacred use, surviving only in fragments preserved by families or carried abroad. Yet even in suppression, memory endured, waiting for revival.
Hybrid outcomes
Ironically, missionary influence also gave rise to new Hawaiian forms. Quilting, taught by missionary women, was transformed into bold Hawaiian appliqué quilts featuring large-scale botanical motifs such as breadfruit and hibiscus. One famous quilt, stitched by Queen Liliʻuokalani during her imprisonment in 1895, survives as both personal lament and national symbol.
Architecture, too, bore this blending. The coral-block Kawaiahaʻo Church in Honolulu, dedicated in 1842, was modeled after New England meetinghouses yet constructed from native materials. Its walls of hand-cut coral blocks, quarried from offshore reefs, are themselves works of collective artistry. The Lahainaluna Seminary trained students not only in reading and writing but also in engraving and printing, skills that fostered both journalism and visual design.
Through the press, Hawaiians recorded chants, genealogies, and oral histories that might otherwise have been lost. The very tool meant to replace tradition ended up preserving it.
Painting the Islands: Nineteenth-Century Landscapes
By the mid-nineteenth century, Hawaiʻi had become a magnet for traveling painters. Volcanoes, waterfalls, and valleys drew artists from Europe and America, while Hawaiian-born painters began to adapt oil painting into their own practice. These landscapes circulated abroad, shaping the image of Hawaiʻi as both sublime wonder and tropical paradise. Yet they also carried local meanings, anchoring sovereignty and community in painted form.
The sublime tropics
Few painters captured Hawaiʻi’s volcanic drama as vividly as Jules Tavernier, a French artist who arrived in 1884. His canvases of Kīlauea, including the famous The Great Eruption of Mauna Loa, 1887 (now in the Honolulu Museum of Art), depict fiery lava fountains against darkened skies, scenes that awed both local audiences and collectors abroad. Tavernier’s work placed Hawaiʻi firmly within the Romantic tradition of the sublime, aligning it with the Alps or Vesuvius while emphasizing its uniqueness.
Other artists, such as Charles Furneaux, painted lush valleys and tranquil forests, favoring soft light and atmospheric effects. His works of Nuʻuanu Valley and Mānoa Valley captured the fertile heart of Oʻahu, offering counterpoints to volcanic spectacle. Furneaux’s paintings, widely collected, helped define the islands as both dramatic and serene.
These images resonated with outsiders who saw Hawaiʻi as untouched wilderness. Yet for Hawaiians, places like Kīlauea were sacred to the goddess Pele, and valleys such as Mānoa were storied in chant and genealogy. Painters rarely understood or conveyed these layers of meaning, but their canvases nonetheless became enduring records of place.
Local adaptations
Hawaiians themselves began to work in oils. Joseph Nāwahī, a statesman, lawyer, and artist born in Hilo in 1842, painted portraits and landscapes that reflected both European techniques and Hawaiian perspectives. Though few of his works survive, his example demonstrates how Hawaiians appropriated Western media to express local realities.
Missionary descendants also produced notable art. Joseph Dwight Strong, who grew up in Honolulu, painted Hawaiian subjects in the late nineteenth century, while Madge Tennent, though arriving later (in the 1920s), built on this tradition by painting monumental images of Hawaiian women. In these works, Western composition blended with Hawaiian subject matter, creating hybrid forms that asserted local presence.
The Honolulu Academy of Arts, founded in 1927 (now the Honolulu Museum of Art), later collected many of these early paintings, preserving them as both art and historical testimony.
The islands as commodity image
Landscape painting was not only art but advertisement. Tavernier’s volcanic canvases were exhibited in San Francisco and New York, enticing tourists and investors. D. Howard Hitchcock, a Hawaiian-born painter active in the late nineteenth century, produced works that highlighted the pastoral beauty of sugar plantations and townscapes. His Hilo Bay, 1885 and other works suggested both prosperity and order, aligning visual art with economic expansion.
Three strands of commodification emerge:
- Volcanic spectacle – lava fountains as natural wonder to be witnessed by adventurous travelers.
- Pastoral order – fertile valleys and plantations depicted as productive, attractive to investors.
- Coastal idylls – beaches and palms framed as leisure landscapes, foreshadowing twentieth-century tourism.
In this way, art helped shape Hawaiʻi’s image abroad as both paradise and opportunity, even as local artists worked to retain their own visions of homeland.
The Royal Arts of the Hawaiian Kingdom
In the nineteenth century, Hawaiʻi’s monarchs used art to assert sovereignty and dignity within a world dominated by imperial powers. Portraits, palaces, and ceremonial revivals expressed both modern legitimacy and cultural continuity. The royal arts of this period reveal how kings and queens wielded creativity as a form of statecraft, producing enduring works that still define Hawaiian identity.
Court portraiture
Portraiture was central to the Hawaiian monarchy’s self-representation. Kamehameha III (Kauikeaouli), who reigned from 1825 to 1854, commissioned portraits in Western style, often in military dress. One well-known example by Robert Dampier, painted during his 1825 visit, shows the king in naval uniform, signaling both global awareness and sovereign confidence.
Later monarchs expanded this practice. King Kalākaua sat for portraits by Isami Doi and foreign painters alike, sometimes pictured in feather regalia to emphasize Hawaiian heritage. Queen Emma and Queen Liliʻuokalani were also frequently painted and photographed, their images circulated in newspapers and diplomatic exchanges.
Photography amplified this strategy. Daguerreotypes of King Kamehameha IV and Queen Emma in the 1850s, and later studio photographs of Kalākaua and Liliʻuokalani, ensured their images traveled widely, reinforcing Hawaiian monarchy in both local and international consciousness.
Royal commissions
Architecture became another stage for royal expression. The most famous example is ʻIolani Palace in Honolulu, commissioned by King Kalākaua and completed in 1882. Designed by architects Thomas J. Baker, Charles J. Wall, and Isaac Moore, it combined European grandeur with Hawaiian materials. With koa wood interiors, elaborate staircases, and imported chandeliers, it embodied Hawaiʻi’s modern monarchy.
Other commissions reflected both diplomacy and cultural blending. The Royal Hawaiian Band, founded by Kamehameha III in 1836 under the direction of German bandmaster Heinrich (Henry) Berger, combined European military music with Hawaiian melodies, creating a new hybrid form of sonic statecraft.
Kalākaua also supported decorative arts: feathered standards (kāhili) adorned the palace, while royal jewelry fused Hawaiian motifs with Western settings. The visual culture of court life—furniture, uniforms, insignia—was itself a carefully curated assertion of identity.
Kalākaua’s revival
Kalākaua, known as the “Merrie Monarch,” was especially committed to using art to sustain tradition. He revived hula at court performances, defying missionary taboos and reestablishing it as a ceremonial art. At his 1883 coronation, elaborate processions featured hula, chants, and feather regalia, staged not only for Hawaiian subjects but also for foreign diplomats.
His revival extended to writing and preservation. Kalākaua sponsored the recording of chants and genealogies, and his 1886 publication, The Legends and Myths of Hawaiʻi, introduced Hawaiian stories to international audiences. Abroad, he carried feather cloaks and gifts to rulers including Pope Leo XIII and Queen Victoria, asserting Hawaiʻi’s place among world monarchies through the language of art.
Photography and the Outsider’s Gaze
By the mid-nineteenth century, photography had arrived in Hawaiʻi, reshaping how the islands were seen both within and beyond the kingdom. Unlike painting or sketching, the camera carried an aura of truth. Yet the images it produced were never neutral: they preserved chiefs and landscapes, but they also staged Hawaiians for foreign expectations and packaged culture into consumable images.
Early daguerreotypes
Some of the earliest Hawaiian daguerreotypes were taken in the 1840s, only a decade after the invention of the process. King Kamehameha III and later King Kamehameha IV and Queen Emma sat for portraits, solemnly posed in formal dress. By the 1860s, Queen Liliʻuokalani was also photographed in both Western gowns and Hawaiian adornments. These portraits, often produced by studios in Honolulu, became treasured keepsakes for families and official symbols of sovereignty.
Notable photographers included Francis Chillingworth and later Charles L. Weed, who documented both Hawaiian royalty and island landscapes. Their works helped establish the visual archive of a kingdom balancing tradition and modernity.
Tourist postcards
By the late nineteenth century, especially after annexation in 1898, photography was commercialized. Studios like Davey Photo Studio in Honolulu produced postcards and cabinet cards depicting hula dancers, surfers at Waikīkī, and volcanic scenes at Kīlauea. These images circulated widely, fueling the tourist trade and shaping Hawaiʻi’s reputation abroad.
Colorized postcards of Waikīkī, sometimes showing Duke Kahanamoku and other beachboys in the early twentieth century, turned surfing into a global symbol of Hawaiian leisure. At the same time, hula was increasingly staged for photographs, posed in ways that emphasized sensuality rather than ritual meaning.
Tourist imagery quickly became formulaic: leis draped over smiling dancers, palms silhouetted at sunset, lava fountains glowing against night skies. These became the shorthand for Hawaiʻi, instantly recognizable to outsiders but stripped of depth.
Performing “authenticity” for outsiders
Studio photography often blurred the line between authenticity and performance. Photographers such as J. J. Williams, who operated a prominent Honolulu studio in the late nineteenth century, posed Hawaiians against painted tropical backdrops, adding leis or feather cloaks as props. Chiefs and dancers sometimes used these sittings to preserve their image for posterity, while others played into outsider expectations.
In some portraits, sitters wore both Western suits and traditional adornments, creating layered images of identity. Others donned full regalia, presenting themselves as bearers of tradition even as the setting was a staged studio. These photographs circulated in albums, newspapers, and tourist shops, creating a visual economy where Hawaiian culture was consumed through carefully arranged images.
Three elements of this staging stand out:
- Backdrops, painted with volcanoes or palms, creating an artificial “Hawaiian paradise.”
- Costumes, combining Western dress with kahili or featherwork for hybrid effect.
- The sitter’s gaze, sometimes direct and defiant, sometimes softened to suit foreign eyes.
The Twentieth-Century Tourist Aesthetic
By the early twentieth century, Hawaiʻi was firmly positioned as a U.S. territory, and tourism became a defining force in how the islands were portrayed. Posters, advertisements, hotels, and entertainment industries crafted an aesthetic of paradise that circulated across the mainland and beyond. This imagery, polished and alluring, shaped international perceptions of Hawaiʻi—sometimes at the expense of complexity, but also with contributions from Hawaiians themselves who worked within and against these frameworks.
Beachboys and posters
The rise of Waikīkī as a tourist destination coincided with the fame of the “beachboys,” local watermen who entertained visitors through surfing lessons, canoe rides, and music. Chief among them was Duke Kahanamoku, Olympic swimmer and surfer, who became an international ambassador for surfing and Hawaiian culture. His image appeared in newspapers, travel brochures, and later films, solidifying Waikīkī’s reputation as the global capital of surf.
Steamship companies such as Matson Navigation Company commissioned striking posters and brochures promoting Hawaiʻi. Designed by artists like Arman Manookian, a Lebanese-born painter who settled in Honolulu in the 1920s, these works depicted surfers gliding across turquoise waves, hula dancers framed by palms, and volcanic peaks glowing at sunset. Bold Art Deco lines and vibrant colors gave Hawaiʻi a modern, glamorous aura while reinforcing a timeless sense of leisure.
Commercial stylizations
Beyond official posters, Hawaiian imagery flooded popular culture. Restaurants and bars across the mainland adopted the “tiki” theme, drawing loosely from Hawaiian and broader Polynesian motifs. While not authentically Hawaiian, these spaces borrowed visual cues—bamboo furniture, carved figures, floral patterns—that made “Hawaiian style” a shorthand for tropical escape.
In Honolulu, souvenir shops near Waikīkī sold hula dolls, shell leis, and postcards featuring dancers and sunsets. Record labels produced albums of Hawaiian music, performed by groups such as Sol Hoʻopiʻi’s Novelty Trio, whose steel guitar stylings shaped perceptions of island sound. Though commercialized, these stylizations still depended on Hawaiian creativity; musicians, dancers, and artisans adapted their traditions to meet tourist demand.
Art Deco Hawaiʻi
The tourist boom also intersected with international design movements. The Royal Hawaiian Hotel, opened in 1927, embodied this blending of luxury and exoticism. Nicknamed the “Pink Palace of the Pacific,” its Moorish arches and lush gardens framed Waikīkī as a stage set for leisure. Inside, Hawaiian motifs appeared in decorative details, integrating local imagery into global Art Deco style.
Artists and architects in Hawaiʻi embraced this fusion. Murals by Juliette May Fraser, such as her 1930s work at the University of Hawaiʻi’s Andrews Outdoor Theatre, combined Hawaiian themes with streamlined modern design. Public buildings incorporated stylized depictions of taro, breadfruit, and waves, marrying Hawaiian subject matter with Deco geometry.
These adaptations were more than commercial flourishes. They represent moments where local imagery and international aesthetics converged, creating a style distinctly tied to Hawaiʻi’s place in the global imagination of modernity.
Hawaiian Modernism and Local Voices
As the twentieth century advanced, Hawaiian artists developed their own forms of modernism, drawing from international movements while grounding their work in island life. From the 1930s through the 1950s, painters, printmakers, and sculptors explored bold styles, supported by growing institutions such as the Honolulu Academy of Arts. Their works established a local canon that resisted tourist clichés and asserted Hawaiʻi’s place in global artistic conversations.
Printmakers and painters
Among the most influential Hawaiian modernists was Isami Doi (1903–1965), born in Kona. Trained in New York and Paris, Doi returned to Hawaiʻi with a distinctive style that combined European modernism with Hawaiian subject matter. His woodblock prints and oil paintings depicted volcanic landscapes, surfers, and symbolic figures, often with flattened planes and rich colors that set him apart as a pioneer of Hawaiian modernism.
Juliette May Fraser (1887–1983), whose murals graced public spaces across Honolulu, created stylized depictions of Hawaiian figures that balanced modernist design with cultural motifs. Her work at the University of Hawaiʻi’s Andrews Outdoor Theatre and later in churches and schools exemplifies this blend of local subject matter and international style.
Another distinctive figure was Madge Tennent (1889–1972), who moved to Hawaiʻi in 1923. Her monumental paintings of Hawaiian women, rendered with swirling brushstrokes and voluptuous forms, celebrated the strength and beauty of Hawaiian subjects in a way that countered tourist trivialization. Her canvases, now housed in the Honolulu Museum of Art, remain among the most recognizable works of twentieth-century Hawaiian painting.
The Honolulu Academy of Arts
Institutional support gave these artists visibility and legitimacy. The Honolulu Academy of Arts, founded in 1927 by Anna Rice Cooke, became the central venue for exhibitions and collections. Its early shows included both European masters and Hawaiian modernists, situating local production within a global framework.
The Academy also hosted the Hawaiʻi Printmakers Society, established in 1928, which fostered experimentation with woodcuts, lithographs, and etchings. Artists such as Huc-Mazelet Luquiens, who taught at the University of Hawaiʻi, trained a generation of Hawaiian printmakers and introduced modernist techniques. His etchings of Diamond Head and Nuʻuanu Valley helped define a new visual vocabulary of the islands.
Crosscurrents with Asia
Hawaiʻi’s position in the Pacific made it a crossroads of artistic exchange. Japanese immigration brought woodblock traditions, which influenced artists such as Sueko Kimura and Satoru Abe. Abe, a painter and sculptor active from the 1950s onward, explored abstraction inspired by both Japanese aesthetics and Hawaiian landscapes.
Filipino and Chinese communities also contributed artistic voices, adding new motifs and perspectives. Exhibitions of Japanese prints at the Academy deepened this cross-pollination, encouraging Hawaiian artists to explore calligraphic lines, ink washes, and symbolic minimalism.
In this hybrid environment, modernism in Hawaiʻi was never a simple import. A cubist-inspired taro field by Doi, or a mural of Hawaiian voyagers by Fraser, was distinctly Hawaiian, shaped by the convergence of multiple traditions on island soil.
The Hawaiian Renaissance of the 1970s
By the 1970s, Hawaiʻi was a U.S. state facing questions of identity and continuity. In this climate, a cultural resurgence known as the Hawaiian Renaissance took shape, reshaping art, music, and performance. It was a revival that reached from hula and chant to voyaging and visual arts, restoring practices long suppressed and inspiring new creative expression.
Hula revival
The most visible dimension of the Renaissance was the revitalization of hula. The Merrie Monarch Festival, founded in 1963 in Hilo and named after King David Kalākaua, became the movement’s heartbeat. Under the leadership of kumu hula such as George Naʻope and ʻIolani Luahine, the festival elevated hula from tourist entertainment to sacred performance once again.
Competitions showcased both hula kahiko (ancient style) and hula ʻauana (modern style), with costumes of ti-leaf skirts, kukui-nut adornments, and feather kāhili replacing synthetic tourist versions. The festival reestablished hula as an art of discipline and cultural depth, inspiring new generations through the hālau hula (hula schools) that spread across the islands and eventually the globe.
Murals, posters, and the art of political expression
Visual art flourished alongside performance. Murals appeared in schools and public spaces, celebrating figures like Kamehameha I or voyaging canoes. Artists such as Jean Charlot, who had moved to Hawaiʻi in the 1940s, and local muralists inspired by his example, used walls as canvases for cultural pride.
Posters promoting community events, from canoe regattas to sovereignty rallies, carried bold Hawaiian lettering, silhouettes of canoes, and stylized taro leaves. The Hawaiian Studies programs established at the University of Hawaiʻi in the 1970s produced graphics and publications that doubled as political art, combining traditional motifs with contemporary design.
These works transformed ordinary surfaces—walls, flyers, posters—into statements of identity, ensuring that Hawaiian imagery reappeared in everyday visual life.
Language and symbol
Language was another artistic medium reclaimed during the Renaissance. The ʻAhahui ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi (Hawaiian Language Society) and the eventual launch of the ʻAha Pūnana Leo immersion preschools in the 1980s restored Hawaiian to daily use. Visual artists responded by incorporating ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi into paintings, prints, and installations, using the written word as both aesthetic and cultural marker.
Symbols of voyaging also reemerged with power. The launch of the double-hulled canoe Hōkūleʻa in 1975, guided by navigator Mau Piailug from Satawal and supported by Hawaiian artist and historian Herb Kawainui Kāne, proved that traditional Polynesian wayfinding could cross oceans without modern instruments. The image of the canoe, depicted in Kāne’s celebrated paintings and posters, became an emblem of cultural survival and resurgence.
Contemporary Hawaiʻi: Between Local and Global
At the turn of the twenty-first century, Hawaiian art entered a new phase, marked by global exposure, experimentation with media, and ongoing negotiation between tradition and innovation. Artists in Hawaiʻi today work across painting, sculpture, video, installation, and performance, exhibiting internationally while remaining grounded in the language, landscapes, and histories of the islands.
Biennials and galleries
The Honolulu Biennial, first held in 2017, placed Hawaiʻi on the map of global contemporary art. It featured Hawaiian and Pacific artists alongside international figures, establishing Honolulu as a crossroads of oceanic and global creativity. The Hawaiʻi State Art Museum (HiSAM) in downtown Honolulu, launched in 2002, also became a major showcase, featuring rotating exhibitions of local artists under the state’s “Art in Public Places” program.
Local galleries such as Nā Mea Hawaiʻi, Polu Gallery, and The Arts at Marks Garage provide platforms for emerging and established artists alike. These spaces highlight works addressing environmental change, cultural survival, and urban development—issues central to life in the islands.
Media and new technology
Contemporary artists often explore media far beyond paint and canvas. Kapulani Landgraf, a photographer and installation artist, critiques colonial legacies and land use through stark black-and-white photography and site-specific works. Maika‘i Tubbs transforms found plastics and trash into sculptural installations, commenting on consumption and environmental crisis.
Solomon Enos, a painter, illustrator, and futurist, reimagines Hawaiian mythology in science-fiction settings, blending ancestral figures with futuristic visions. His Polyfantastica series positions Hawaiian culture within speculative futures, bridging past and possibility.
Other artists use digital projection, sound installations, or immersive video to explore voyaging, memory, and ecological fragility. Their work continues the Hawaiian tradition of adapting materials to serve story and ceremony, whether the medium is feather, stone, or pixel.
Tourism and questions of authenticity
Tourism still shapes Hawaiʻi’s artistic landscape. Souvenir shops in Waikīkī continue to sell postcards, dolls, and mass-produced “tiki” carvings, echoing patterns set in the twentieth century. Yet contemporary artists often confront and subvert these clichés.
For example, Carl Pao creates paintings and sculptures that reinterpret tourist imagery, reworking motifs like leis or surfboards into layered explorations of cultural resilience. Others, such as Sean Browne, a sculptor, produce monumental bronzes of Hawaiian figures that reclaim public space for indigenous narratives.
The tension between expectation and authenticity remains central. Hawaiian artists do not simply reject tourist imagery—they reshape it, critique it, or sidestep it altogether. This negotiation ensures that Hawaiian art continues to speak in multiple registers: locally rooted, globally conversant, and unafraid to challenge simplifications.
Continuity and Change in Hawaiian Artistic Identity
Across centuries, Hawaiian art has moved through extraordinary transformations—stone adzes quarried at Mauna Kea, feathered cloaks gifted to Captain James Cook, murals painted by Juliette May Fraser, and futuristic canvases by Solomon Enos. Yet despite this breadth, certain threads run unbroken: a reverence for land and sea, a commitment to lineage, and a remarkable capacity to adapt new forms while sustaining old meanings. Hawaiian art today stands as both a continuation and a renewal of traditions shaped over a millennium.
Ancestral echoes
Modern artists continue to reference ancestral forms. Sculptor Sean Browne creates bronze figures of Hawaiian monarchs that recall the carved ki‘i once placed at Puʻuhonua o Hōnaunau. Kapulani Landgraf’s photography of stone temple sites like Wailua Complex on Kauaʻi transforms ancient structures into contemporary statements of endurance. Herb Kawainui Kāne, both painter and co-founder of the Polynesian Voyaging Society, left iconic images of the canoe Hōkūleʻa, which serve as visual bridges between ancestral voyaging and modern resurgence.
In each case, the medium changes—bronze, photography, oil paint—but the echo remains: the canoe, the ki‘i, the heiau, all reappear as symbols reinterpreted for new contexts. Continuity resides not in unchanging forms but in the persistence of themes.
The role of place
Hawaiian art has always been shaped by its environment. The volcanic summits of Mauna Kea, the fire goddess Pele’s domain at Kīlauea, and the fertile valleys of Mānoa are not mere scenery but active presences in art. Isami Doi’s modernist landscapes, Madge Tennent’s monumental portraits of Hawaiian women, and Solomon Enos’s futuristic worlds all reveal the centrality of place, whether literal or imagined.
Three recurring motifs illustrate this enduring bond:
- The canoe, embodied in both ancient waʻa kaulua and the modern Hōkūleʻa.
- The taro plant, celebrated in quilts by Queen Liliʻuokalani and in contemporary paintings as a symbol of sustenance and genealogy.
- The volcano, from Tavernier’s nineteenth-century canvases of Mauna Loa eruptions to contemporary installations that explore climate and creation.
Looking ahead
Hawaiian artists today continue to navigate the tension between tradition and innovation, local voice and global platform. Institutions such as the Honolulu Museum of Art, the Hawaiʻi State Art Museum, and the Merrie Monarch Festival ensure that both historical works and living practices remain visible. Younger artists—digital innovators, muralists, sculptors—carry forward ancestral echoes while speaking to present challenges of climate, identity, and sovereignty.
The future of Hawaiian art will not be defined by a single style or medium but by its ability to remain anchored in the islands while conversing with the world. Whether in the shimmer of feather, the rhythm of chant, the brushstroke of modernism, or the pixel of digital projection, Hawaiian art sustains its identity through change. The canoe, the chant, and the cloak continue—not as relics of the past, but as living symbols steering the islands forward.
