The Honolulu Museum of Art is an art museum in Honolulu, Hawaiʻi. The museum is the largest of its kind in the state, and was founded in 1922 by Anna Rice Cooke. The museum has one of the largest single collections of Asian and Pan-Pacific art in the United States, and since its official opening on April 8, 1927, its collections have grown to more than 55,000 works of art.
Toshiko Takaezu was an American ceramic artist, painter, sculptor, and educator who was known for her rounded, closed forms that viewed ceramics as a fine art and more than a functional vessel. She is of Japanese descent and from Pepeeko, Hawaii.
John Chin Young 容澤泉 (1909–1997) was a painter who was born in Honolulu, Hawaii on March 26, 1909. He was the son of Chinese immigrants and began drawing at the age of eight, stimulated by Chinese calligraphy, which he learned in Chinese language school. Young had his first and only art lessons while a student at President William McKinley High School in Honolulu. Thereafter, his art was entirely self-taught. Young is best known for his Zen-like depictions of horses, paintings of children, and abstractions. Over the years, he acquired an important collection of ancient Asian art, which he donated to the Honolulu Museum of Art and the University of Hawaii at Manoa as the John Young Museum. John Chin Young died in 1997 at the age of 88. His daughter Debbie Young is also a painter residing in Hawaii.
The Honolulu Museum of Art Spalding House, formerly The Contemporary Museum, Honolulu, was integrated into the Honolulu Museum of Art under this name. It was the only museum in the state of Hawaii devoted exclusively to contemporary art. The Contemporary Museum had two venues: in residential Honolulu at the historic Spalding House, and downtown Honolulu at First Hawaiian Center. All venues continue to be open to the public.
Tadashi Sato was an American artist. He was born in Kaupakalua on the Hawaiian island of Maui. His father had been a pineapple laborer, merchant, and calligrapher, and Tadashi's grandfather was a sumi-e artist.
Satoru Abe is a Japanese American sculptor and painter.
Alan Leitner is an American abstract artist. He was born in 1947 in an ethnically diverse section of Los Angeles. Alan was the middle of three children in a Jewish family. He received his B.S. in art in 1971 from Woodbury University in Los Angeles, where he met his first wife who wanted to move to Hawaii. Also in 1971, he acquired an art foundry that produced blown glass, sculpture, ceramics and paintings, which contributed greatly to his understanding of art. In 1987, he received a M.F.A. in painting from the University of Hawaii at Manoa. The graduate program required students to do some teaching, and through this teaching he met Alyn Brownley who at the time headed the art program at Leeward Community College. Brownley requested Alan to teach her art class for one semester while she pursued a move to University of Hawaii at Manoa. After graduation, Dr. John Conner, the department associate dean, offered Alan a full-time teaching position at Leeward Community College, where he is currently a professor. Alan has also taught at Honolulu Community College and University of Hawaii at Manoa.
Ron Kent, also known as Ronald E. Kent, was an American woodturner who was born in Chicago, Illinois. He ran his own investment company in Hawaii. In 1975, his wife Myra gave him an inexpensive lathe for Christmas. Not wanting to seem unappreciative, he walked down to the beach and found a piece of driftwood. Fitting it on the lathe, he turned a form from it with a sharpened screwdriver. In 1997, Kent took an early retirement from his financial profession to concentrate exclusively on woodturning. Ron Kent lives in Honolulu, Hawaii.
Kelly Sueda is a painter who was born and raised in Hawaii. He received a BFA from the Academy of Art College in San Francisco and the University of San Francisco. He has shown his paintings in both solo and group shows in Hawaii and on the mainland. Kelly Sueda lives and works in Hawaii, and his work is in the collection of the Honolulu Museum of Art.
David Kuraoka is an American ceramic artist. He was born in Lihue, Hawaii, grew up on the island of Kauai, Hawaii in Hanamaulu and Lihue, and graduated from Kauai High School in 1964. Kuraoka spent his formative years in Hanamaulu where he lived with his parents in his paternal grandmother's home in a plantation labor camp. His father, one of seven children and the only son, became a journalist, writing a weekly column published on Wednesdays, and the Kauai campaign manager for local politician Hiram Fong and Richard Nixon. His mother, Emiko Kuraoka, was a school teacher. He is married to Carol Kuraoka. Kuraoka moved to California in 1964 to study architecture at San Jose City College, eventually transferring to San José State University where he received his BA in 1970 and MA 1971. After completing graduate work that focused on ceramics, Kuraoka joined the faculty at San Francisco State University, eventually rising to head its ceramics department.
Fred H. Roster was an American sculptor known for his mixed media narrative sculptures.
Leland Miyano is an artist, landscape designer and author born and raised in Hawai'i. He received his Fine Arts degree from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.
Sean Kekamakupaʻa Lee Loy Browne is a contemporary sculptor who was born in Hilo, Hawaii. He attended the Kamehameha Schools and then earned a BA in studio art from the University of Redlands in 1975. In 1981, he studied marble carving under Paoli Silverio in Pietrasanta, Italy and was later appointed an artist-in-residence at the Henraux Marble Company in Lucca, Italy. He returned to Hawaii and earned an MFA in sculpture from the University of Hawaii at Manoa in 1983. In 1985 he was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship, enabling him to study with Isamu Noguchi in Shikoku, Japan. For many years, Browne taught sculpture at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and at Kapiolani Community College.
The Catharine E. B. Cox Award for Excellence in the Visual Arts is a biennial award given to a visual artist who is a former or current resident of Hawaii. The recipient may work in any medium, and is honored with a solo exhibition at the Honolulu Museum of Art. The award was established in 1985 by Charles S. Cox of La Jolla, California, Doak C. Cox of Honolulu and Richard H. Cox of Honolulu to honor their grandmother, Catharine Elizabeth Bean Cox.
Michael Tom (1946–1999) was an American sculptor.
Jason Jun Teraoka is a figurative painter who was born in Kapaʻa, Hawaiʻi. He is a fourth-generation Japanese-American who lives and works in Honolulu, and is largely self-taught. In 2000, he received the Hawaii State Foundation on Culture and the Arts Arts Acquisition Award, and in 2001 he received the Reuben Tam Award for Painting from the Honolulu Museum of Art.
Aaron Padilla is an American artist and art educator.
Allyn Bromley is an American printmaker and art educator who was born in San Francisco. She first came to Hawaii in 1952, and subsequently moved to Waikiki, where she lived for nine years. From 1961 to 1965, she lived in Europe, returning to Hawaii in 1965. She received a BFA from the University of Hawaii at Manoa in 1968 and an MFA from the University of Colorado Boulder in 1971.
Harry Suyemi Tsuchidana is an American abstract painter. He was born in Waipahu, Hawaii to parents who owned a two-acre farm. Tsuchidana enlisted in the United States Marine Corps upon graduation from high school in 1952. When discharged from the Marines in 1955, he enrolled in the Corcoran School of Art. He then moved to New York City, where he studied at the Brooklyn Museum Art School, and at the Pratt Contemporary Graphic Arts Center in New York City. While enrolled in classes, he worked as a guard and custodian at the Corcoran Gallery of Art and as a night watchman at the Museum of Modern Art. In 1959, he received a John Hay Whitney Fellowship.
Dorothy A. Faison also Dorothy Ries Faison is an American artist who was born in Schenectady, New York. She lived in Central and South America from age six to age twelve, because her stepfather worked for the United States Agency for International Development. Her family returned to the United States in 1968, and settled in Hawaii. She received a bachelor of fine arts degree from the University of Hawaii at Manoa in 1977 and earned a master of fine arts degree from the Otis Art Institute in 1979. In 1990, Dorothy Faison was the recipient of the first Catharine E. B. Cox Award for Excellence in the Visual Arts and has a solo exhibition at the Honolulu Academy of Arts. As of 2017 she lives and works in Dordogne, France, with her filmmaker husband, Simon Holland.
