Spalding House, also known as the Cooke-Spalding House was an art museum and sculpture garden in Honolulu, Hawaii (now closed). It was called Nuumealani (heavenly terrace) by Anna Rice Cooke, who commissioned it. The house and gardens constituted a 3+1⁄2-acre former art museum in the Makiki Heights district of Honolulu.
Spalding House was built as a residence in 1925 by Mrs. Cooke, the widow of Charles Montague Cooke, a local businessman and missionary descendant. At the same time, the Honolulu Academy of Art (later renamed Honolulu Museum of Art), which Mrs. Cooke endowed, was being built on the site of her former home on Beretania Street in Honolulu. The Makiki Heights home was designed by Hart Wood and later enlarged by the firm of Bertram Goodhue and Associates. In 1950, Cooke's daughter, Alice Spalding (Mrs. Phillip Spalding), engaged Vladimir Ossipoff to remodel the ground floor. [1] The Honolulu Museum of Art acquired the estate as a bequest from Alice Spalding in 1968 and operated it as an annex for the display of Japanese prints from 1970 to 1978. In the late 1970s, it was sold to a subsidiary of The Honolulu Advertiser . In 1986, the Thurston Twigg-Smith family converted it to The Contemporary Museum. Following interior renovation, the museum, with its doors by artists Robert Graham and Tony Berlant, opened to the public in October 1988. [2] [3]
On May 2, 2011, The Contemporary Museum, Honolulu ceased to exist as an independent entity, and is now known as the Honolulu Museum of Art Spalding House. The Honolulu Academy of Art acquired Spalding House along with its collections of more than 3,000 works of art. [4] The Makiki Heights building, which has about 5,000 square feet of gallery space, reassumed its former name, “Spalding House." Around that time the Honolulu Academy of Art rebranded itself Honolulu Museum of Art.
David Hockney designed stage sets for three one-act French operas presented at the Metropolitan Opera in 1981. He reconstructed these stage sets for a 1983 exhibition at the Walker Art Center, Hockney Paints the Stage. The three-dimensional set for Maurice Ravel's opera, L'enfant et les sortilèges (The Child and the Spells), was acquired for the 1988 opening of The Contemporary Museum, Honolulu, and was installed in the Milton Cades Pavilion on the grounds of Spalding House. [5]
The surrounding gardens were originally landscaped between 1928 and 1941 as a Japanese stroll garden by Reverend K. H. Inagaki, a Christian minister of Japanese ancestry. In 1941, he traveled to Japan to visit relatives, and was never heard from again. From 1979 to 1980, the gardens were resuscitated by Honolulu landscape architect James C. Hubbard. During the 1990s, Kahaluʻu-based landscape architect Leland Miyano brought the gardens to their current state. While open as a museum, the grounds displayed sculpture by Satoru Abe, Charles Arnoldi, John Buck, Mark Bulwinkle, Deborah Butterfield, Gordon Chandler, Jedd Garet, Jun Kaneko, George Rickey, James Seawright, Toshiko Takaezu, Tom Wesselmann, and Arnold Zimmerman. [6]
The Honolulu Museum of Art announced in July 2019 that it would close its Spalding House location and put the property on the market. [7] The site closed to the public in December 2019. [8]
Honolulu is the capital and most populous city of the U.S. state of Hawaii, which is in the Pacific Ocean. It is an unincorporated county seat of the consolidated City and County of Honolulu, situated along the southeast coast of the island of Oʻahu, and is the westernmost and southernmost major U.S. city. Honolulu is Hawaii's main gateway to the world. It is also a major hub for business, finance, hospitality, and military defense in both the state and Oceania. The city is characterized by a mix of various Asian, Western, and Pacific cultures, reflected in its diverse demography, cuisine, and traditions.
David Hockney is an English painter, draftsman, printmaker, stage designer, and photographer. As an important contributor to the pop art movement of the 1960s, he is considered one of the most influential British artists of the 20th century.
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.
Jun Kaneko is a Japanese-born American ceramic artist known for creating large scale ceramic sculpture. Based out of a studio warehouse in Omaha, Nebraska, Kaneko primarily works in clay to explore the effects of repeated abstract surface motifs by using ceramic glaze.
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.
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.
Satoru Abe is a Japanese American sculptor and painter.
Anna Rice Cooke was a patron of the arts and the founder of the Honolulu Museum of Art.
Vladimir ‘Val’ Nicholas Ossipoff was an American architect best known for his works in the state of Hawai'i.
Honolulu County is a consolidated city–county in the U.S. state of Hawaii. The city–county includes both the city of Honolulu and the rest of the island of Oʻahu, as well as several minor outlying islands, including all of the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands except Midway Atoll.
The Metcalf Chateau, also known as The Group of Seven, was a group of Asian-American artists with ties to Honolulu. The name is derived from a house slated for demolition on Metcalf Street in Honolulu, in which they exhibited in 1954. The exhibition was seen by Robert Griffin, director of the Honolulu Academy of Arts, who arranged for the artists to have a group show at the museum. The group's members were Satoru Abe, Bumpei Akaji (1921-2002), Edmund Chung, Tetsuo Ochikubo (1923-1975), Jerry T. Okimoto (1924-1998), James Park, and Tadashi Sato (1923-2005).
Mark Chai is a Native Hawaiian sculptor who designs and handcrafts fine woods and recycled materials into modern lamps, sculpture, large installations and furniture.
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.
Charles Montague Cooke was a businessman during the Kingdom of Hawaii, Republic of Hawaii, and Territory of Hawaii.
Helen Thomas Dranga (1866–1927), who is also known as Carrie Helen Dranga, was a British/American painter who made paintings of Hawaii.
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.
Alice Kagawa Parrott was a Japanese American fiber artist and ceramicist. She spent most of her adult life in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she established a reputation as one of the country's most important weavers, and opened one of Santa Fe's first shops devoted weaving and crafts.
Sanit Khewhok is a painter, sculptor, curator, and conservator.
Merle Newport Boyer was an American modernist studio art jeweler and sculptor, as well as inventor, machinist, teacher and mentor.