Hawai‘i contemporary art summit
2021 | participants
Ai weiwei
Ai Weiwei is renowned for making strong aesthetic statements that resonate with timely phenomena across today’s geopolitical world. From architecture to installations, social media to documentaries, Ai uses a wide range of mediums as expressions of new ways for his audiences to examine society and its values. Recent exhibitions include: Ai Weiwei: Resetting Memories at MARCO in Monterrey, Ai Weiwei: Bare Life at the Mildred Lane Kemper Museum in St. Louis, Ai Weiwei at the K20/K21 in Dusseldorf, and Good Fences Make Good Neighbors with the Public Art Fund in New York City.
Ai was born in Beijing in 1957 and currently resides and works in Berlin. Ai is the recipient of the 2015 Ambassador of Conscience Award from Amnesty International and the 2012 Václav Havel Prize for Creative Dissent from the Human Rights Foundation.
Photo © Ai Weiwei Studio; Courtesy the Artist and Lisson Gallery. Photography by Guo Yuan.
drew kahu‘aina broderick
Associate Curator, Hawai‘i Triennial 2022
Drew Kahu‘āina Broderick is an artist, independent curator, and educator from Mōkapu, Kailua, Koʻolaupoko, Oʻahu. Currently, he serves as director of Koa Gallery at Kapiʻolani Community College. Recently, he completed an MA from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College (2019). Previously, he worked in the Hawai‘i-based art collective PARADISE COVE (2015–2018), operated an artist-run venue SPF Projects (2012–2016), and co-founded an annual open-call, thematic exhibition, CONTACT (2014–2019), with community arts organizer Maile Meyer. Collaborative curatorial projects in development include ʻAi Pōhaku and I OLA KANALOA, with Josh Tengan (Assistant Curator HB19), and Revisiting Kealakekua Bay, Reworking the Captain Cook Monument as part of a hui of Hawaiʻi-based artist practitioners.
Photo courtesy of Drew Kahu‘āina Broderick
melissa chiu
Curatorial Director, Hawai‘i Triennial 2022
Melissa Chiu is a renowned international curator, who is currently director of Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. Among Chiu’s many professional accolades, including serving as museum director and senior vice president, Global Art Programs (2001–2014) at Asia Society in New York, she is recognized for realizing landmark exhibitions by Shirin Neshat, Robert Irwin, Yayoi Kusama, Charline von Heyl, Zhang Huan, Yoshitomo Nara and for co-curating One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now (2006–8) and Art and China’s Revolution (2008). Chiu has authored and edited books and catalogues on contemporary art, including Contemporary Art in Asia: A Critical Reader (MIT Press, 2010), and has lectured at Harvard, Yale, Columbia, the Museum of Modern Art, and others.
Photo by Greg Powers, courtesy of the Smithsonian Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden
‘elepaio press
’Elepaio Press (Mark Hamasaki and Richard Hamasaki).
Richard Hamasaki was born on a U.S. Army base in Sapporo, Japan, in 1952. Itinerate due to his Paʻauilo-born father’s career, he and his two siblings travelled and lived abroad primarily on military bases in the U.S. and Japan, returning to Hawai‘i frequently to visit family. For three years, he attended a mostly segregated public high school in Northern Virginia that was forced to integrate in 1968. He began writing poetry in the 10th grade, as well as playing bass guitar in an underground rock band (1967-70). By the time he graduated, all traces of his high school existence were erased in his senior year book. At Boston University (1970-74), he earned a degree in English literature and a teaching certificate after student teaching at South Boston High School in 1973.
After college, he returned to Honolulu and co-founded ʻElepaio Press (1976–present) and on a shoestring, independently published an art and literary journal Seaweeds and Constructions (1976-1984). After the untimely death of his friend and mentor Wayne Kaumualii Westlake (1947-84), he earned his M.A. in Pacific Islands Studies with a focus on Hawaiʻi and Pacific literatures at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa (1985-89). He has been active in Hawai‘i’s literary arts, collaborating with poets, musicians, visual artists, photographers, filmmakers, teachers, and scholars locally, regionally, and internationally for over 45 years.
In 2001, the University of Hawai‘i Press published Hamasaki’s collection of poetry, From the Spider Bone Diaries: Poems and Songs, first published by Kalamakū Press in 2000. In 2009, the University of Hawai‘i Press published Westlake, Poems by Wayne Kaumualii Westlake (1947-1984), which he co-edited with Westlake’s former partner, Mei-Li Siy. Westlake is now in its second printing.
Hamasaki’s teaching career spanned 40 years including 28 years as a high school English teacher at Kamehameha Schools, Kapālama campus (1987-2015). In 2018, he was the Executive Producer of a 20-minute narrative film, Down on the Sidewalk in Waikīkī that was directed by one of his former students, filmmaker Justyn Ah Chong (Kamehameha Schools, Kapālama, c/o 2007). Inspired by Westlake’s poems, film director ʻĀina Paikai wrote the screenplay and was the principal actor in this award-winning film.
He continues to work independently and collaboratively, publishing his poetry, recordings, and film.
Photo by Mark Hamasaki
léuli eshraghi
Léuli Eshrāghi (Sāmoan, Persian, Cantonese) works across visual arts, curatorial practice and university research. Ia intervenes in display territories to centre Indigenous kin constellations, sensual and spoken languages, and ceremonial-political practices. Through performance, moving image, writing and installation, ia engages with Indigenous futurities as haunted by ongoing militourist and missionary violences that once erased faʻafafine-faʻatama people from kinship and knowledge structures.
Ia contributes to growing international critical practice across the Great Ocean and North America through residencies, exhibitions, publications, teaching and rights advocacy. Eshrāghi is board secretary of the Indigenous Curatorial Collective, the inaugural Horizon/Indigenous Futures postdoctoral fellow at Concordia University, a member of The Space Between Us SSHRC research partnership (2020-28) led by Dr Julie Nagam, an affiliate member of the Wominjeka Djeembana research lab at Monash University led by Dr Brian Martin, and a member of the Asia Pacific Artistic Research Network led by Dr Danny Butt at University of Melbourne and Kurniawan Adi Saputro at Indonesian Institute of the Arts Yogyakarta.
Photography by Rhett Hammerton
Karrabing film collective
‘The Karrabing Film Collective uses film to analyze contemporary settler colonialism and through these depictions challenge its grip. In the shadow of Third Cinema and Theater of the Oppressed, Karrabing is creating a new model for Indigenous filmmaking and activism.’
– Karrabing Film Collective
Based in Australia’s Northern Territories, the Karrabing Film Collective is an Indigenous media group whose work exists in a distinctive space between artists’ film, activism, narrative cinema and grassroots self-representation. Consisting of approximately 30 members—predominantly living in the Belyuen community—the collective approaches filmmaking as a form of critical resistance and self-organization. Australia’s Northwest Territory government’s Emergency Response intervention led to measures that have enabled police to enter Indigenous homes at will, drastically increased Indigenous incarceration for minor offenses, lead to cuts in social welfare and pressured clans to open their land to mining corporations. These issues, among others, come into Karrabing’s films, appearing through a method the group calls “improvisational realism” that creates a space both between and beyond documentary and fiction. Karrabing means “tide out” in the Emmiyengal language and refers to the northwest coastline of Australia that connects the members of the collective.
Still from The Jealous One (2017). Courtesy of the collective.
na maka o ka ‘aina
Nā Maka o ka ‘Āina (Joan Lander)
Joan Lander has been involved in documentary production since 1974, working as producer, director, videographer and editor with early community public access groups, the Hawai‘i Department of Education’s educational television division, independent production teams such as Videololo, and finally, since 1982, Nā Maka o ka ʻĀina. With co-producer, the late Puhipau, she produced close to 100 documentary and educational programs focusing on Hawaiian culture, history, language, environment, and the politics of independence and sovereignty. Seen on PBS, commercial TV and international television and cable networks, Nā Maka o ka ‘Āina productions have screened at film festivals worldwide, capturing various awards, including the Hawai‘i Film Office’s Film in Hawai‘i Award and the Silver Maile from the Hawai‘i International Film Festival.
Among the documentaries that have aired throughout the U.S. on PBS stations are Act of War - The Overthrow of the Hawaiian Nation (1993), Mauna Kea – Temple Under Siege (2006), Stolen Waters (1998), Pele’s Appeal (1995), and Makua Homecoming (1983).
Photo courtesy of Joan Lander
Mark “Gooch” Noguchi cooks from an ‘āina-based perspective, connecting food to its source to build community. An approach he learned from hula Halau o Kekuhi, it’s defined his innovative restaurant offerings like He`eia Kea Pier, MISSION Social Hall & Cafe, and his current Pili Group, a non-traditional food concept interweaving community, education and food. A graduate of the Culinary Institute of America, 2019 Omidyar Fellow, Mark is now a Food & Sustainability Curriculum Specialist at Punahou School.
Photo courtesy of Mark Noguchi
kawika pegram
Kawika Pegram is a 19-year-old, first-year student at American University. He is also the Executive Director of the Hawai‘i Youth Climate Coalition. In his spare time, he enjoys working on his aquariums and different social justice projects.
Photo courtesy of Kawika Pegram.
mika tajima
Mika Tajima’s work is about control, performance, and freedom. She analyzes the evolving and amorphous zones that intersect productivity and leisure, examining how human behavior and emotional experiences have been transformed within the long sweep of capitalist development. Concerned not with the conditions but with the conditioning of modern human life, Tajima’s research-based practice explores the technologies and ideologies that cultivate the subtle molding of human behavior through aesthetic conditioning.
The technology underlying Tajima’s most recent artwork uses real-time language data to model and proliferate possible future human expressions, thereby creating emergent psychographies not yet captured or fully identifiable. At the same time, her work addresses notions of capture: how can one escape being scraped, detected or quantized?
Mika Tajima was born in Los Angeles, CA lives and works in New York, NY. She holds a BA in Fine Arts and East Asian Studies from Bryn Mawr College, Bryn Mawr, PA, and an MFA from Columbia University, School of the Arts, New York, NY. Selected exhibitions include: Æther at Borusan Contemporary, Istanbul, Turkey; TOUCHLESS, Taro Nasu Gallery, Tokyo, Japan; Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Harford, CT; Embody, 11R, New York, NY; COLORI, Castello di Rivoli and GAM, Torino, Italy; All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France; Meridian (Gold), Sculpture Center, New York, NY. Public collections include: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.
Photo courtesy of the artist
homi k. bhabha
Homi K. Bhabha is the Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities in the English and Comparative Literature Departments at Harvard University. He was founding director of the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University from 2011-2019 and director of the Harvard Humanities Center from 2005-2011. From 2008-2019, he held the inaugural position of Senior Adviser on the Humanities to the President and Provost at Harvard University and from 2005-2008 served as Senior Adviser in the Humanities at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. He is a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy.
Bhabha is the author of numerous works exploring postcolonial theory, cultural change and power, contemporary art, and cosmopolitanism. His works include Nation and Narration and The Location of Culture, which was reprinted as a Routledge Classic in 2004. His next book will be published by the University of Chicago Press. Bhabha has written on contemporary art for Artforum and has written a range of essays on William Kentridge, Anish Kapoor, Taryn Simon, and Mathew Barney, amongst others. He is a member of the Academic Committee for the Shanghai Power Station of Art, advisor on the Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives (CMAP) project at the Museum of Modern Art New York, and Curator in Residence of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Bhabha served on jury for the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009 and the 2018 Sharjah Biennial. In 2019, he was honored by the Institute of Contemporary Art in London for his influential work in studies of colonialism, postcolonialism, and globalization.
With the support of the Volkswagen and Mellon Foundations, Bhabha is leading a research project on the Global Humanities. In 1997 he was profiled by Newsweek as one of “100 Americans for the Next Century.” He holds honorary degrees from Université Paris 8, University College London, and the Free University Berlin. In 2012 he was awarded the Government of India’s Padma Bhushan Presidential Award in the field of literature and education and received the Humboldt Research Prize in 2015. In 2018 Bhabha received an honorary doctorate at Stellenbosch University in Cape Town, South Africa.
Photo by Stephanie Mitchell
Kevin Carvalho
Chef Kevin Carvalho is passionate about Hawai‘i, nature, gastronomy, and life. Growing up learning to hunt and fish, Kevin’s family ingrained the importance of respecting every catch and a cooking style in which nothing goes to waste.
In 2010, Kevin became a Chef de Partie under Chef Mavrothalassitis of Chef Mavro Restaurant and worked his way around the kitchen. He was awarded, along with the team, the AAA 5 diamond award all three years he was there. Working for Chef Mavro is where he learned humility and technique. In 2014, he served as Executive Sous Chef under Michelin Starred Chef Michael Mina and opened multiple venues with the Mina Team. He later became Executive Sous Chef of Alohilani Resort Waikiki in 2016 where he transformed an outdated hotel to one of Hawaii’s hottest chic resorts. Kevin joined Dean & Deluca Hawaii as their Executive Chef in 2019, where he is bringing his local inspired, modern touch, to the high-end brand.
Photo courtesy of the chef.
eating in public
EATING IN PUBLIC (EIP) was founded in 2003 in Hawai‘i by Gaye Chan and Nandita Sharma to nudge a little space outside of the State and capitalist systems. Following the path of pirates and nomads, hunters and gathers, diggers and levelers, they gather at people’s homes, plant free food gardens on private and public land, set up free stores and other autonomous systems of exchange, generally without permission. Unlike Santa and the State, they give equally to the naughty and the nice. Their projects do not exploit anyone’s labor nor offer any tax-deductions.
EIP has initiated over 1,000 projects. On rare occasions they take part in art exhibitions in the forms of distribution centers or how-to demonstrations. They have done so at venues such as Flux Factory (Bronx), Honolulu Museum of Art, San Jose Museum of Art, and Southern Exposure (San Francisco).
Photo credit: Rae Huo
‘elepaio press / piliamo‘o
’Elepaio Press (Mark Hamasaki and Richard Hamasaki)
Piliāmo‘o (Mark Hamasaki and Kapulani Landgraf), collaboratively, have documented the construction of the H-3 freeway, the water struggle of Waiāhole, and the ahupuaʻa of Kailua.
Mark Hamasaki was born in 1955 in Fort Belvoir, Virginia, and graduated from high school in Bangkok, Thailand. Just after his graduation, he became a novice Buddhist monk and traveled throughout Thailand. He later earned a BFA in photography from the Rochester Institute of Technology and an MFA (equivalent) from Allgemeine Gewerbeschule Basel (Basel School of Design) in Switzerland.
He taught photography and art at Windward Community College for 34 years and served as Humanities Department Chair (2014-2018). In 1991, the Honolulu Star Bulletin named Hamasaki with Libby Young as among “The 10 Who Made a Difference” in Hawai‘i citing them for their efforts to secure from the Hawaiʻi State Legislature $12.5 million for Windward Community College’s Master Plan.
A co-founder of ʻElepaio Press (1976 to present), in 1977, he designed and printed a chapbook, 7 Poems / 8 Photographs. He is responsible for designing and printing a variety of periodicals and books such as the Hawaiʻi edition of Mana, A South Pacific Journal of Language and Literature; Seaweeds and Constructions, A Pacific Islands Collection; Poets Behind Barbed Wire; and O Na Holoholona Wawae Eha O Ka Lama Hawaii: The Four-Footed Animals of Ka Lama Hawaii. He also designed two University of Hawaiʻi Press books, From the Spider Bone Diaries, Poems and Songs and Westlake: Poems by Wayne Kaumualii Westlake (1947-1984).
In 2015, ‘Ai Pōhaku Press published a 167-page photographic essay Ē Luku Wale Ē by Piliāmoʻo, a working collective featuring his and Kapulani Landgraf’s photographs. His photographs, collages, and collaborative works are exhibited and published locally, nationally, and internationally.
Photo by Kapulani Landgraf
theaster gates
Theaster Gates lives and works in Chicago. Gates creates works that engage with space theory and land development, sculpture and performance. Drawing on his interest and training in urban planning and preservation, Gates redeems spaces that have been left behind. Known for his recirculation of art — world capital, Gates creates work that focuses on the possibility of the “life within things.” His work contends with the notion of Black space as a formal exercise — one defined by collective desire, artistic agency, and the tactics of a pragmatist.
In 2010, Gates created the Rebuild Foundation, a nonprofit platform for art, cultural development, and neighborhood transformation that supports artists and strengthens communities through free arts programming and innovative cultural amenities on Chicago’s South Side.
Gates has exhibited and performed at Tate Liverpool, UK (2020); Haus der Kunst, Munich (2020); Walker Art Centre, Minneapolis (2019); Palais de Tokyo Paris, France (2019); Sprengel Museum Hannover, Germany (2018); Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland (2018); National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., USA (2017); Art Gallery of Ontario, Canada (2016); Fondazione Prada, Milan, Italy (2016); Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK (2013); Punta della Dogana, Venice, Italy (2013) and dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel, Germany (2012). He was the winner of the Artes Mundi 6 prize and a recipient of the Légion d’Honneur in 2017. In 2018, he was awarded the Nasher Prize for Sculpture, and the Urban Land Institute, J.C. Nichols Prize for Visionaries in Urban Development. Gates received the 2020 Crystal Award for his leadership in creating sustainable communities.
Gates is a professor at the University of Chicago in the Department of Visual Arts and the Harris School of Public Policy, and is Distinguished Visiting Artist and Director of Artist Initiatives at the Lunder Institute for American Art at Colby College.
Photo Credit: John R. Boehm
Mari j. matsuda
Mari J. Matsuda is a sculptor, printmaker, metalsmith, organic gardener, critical race theorist, law professor, and intersectional feminist. She does not see any of those things as distinct from the other. She comes from a long line of makers, and make-do survivors, who also happened to read Marx. Her grandmother, Tsuyuko Matsuda, painted and wrote poems from behind barbed wire at Heart Mountain Internment Camp. Her grandfather, Jinkichi Matsuda, helped run the pre-war literary journal “Loo Choo,” recording the poems and ideas of radical Okinawan immigrants in the pre-war period. From the ancestors, Matsuda learned that art, politics, struggle, theory and community were all one project, and that working class philosopher/artists have always existed beyond the walls of any academy. They believed that a new world was in birth, a world in which all human beings were entitled to dignity and flourishing, and in which we would have food, shelter, health, joy, art, music, song, and dance, in every single day of our time on earth. They were right. It’s coming.
Photo courtesy of Mari J. Matsuda.
navid najafi
A founding member of the conscious rap collective Super Groupers and a two-time Nā Hōkū Hanohano Award winner for Hip Hop Album of the Year, Navid Najafi (illnomadic) was born in Tehran, Iran, but, at the age of 8, fled with his family to New York at the height of the Iran-Iraq war. After several relocations and years of feeling unrooted, Illnomadic finally found home when he moved to Hawai‘i at the age of 19. He is now one of the most respected and highly regarded emcees and hip hop educators in Hawai‘i. An accomplished artist, organizer, activist, and volunteer in his community, Illnomadic considers himself a deep ally of Native Hawaiians, Hawaiian Kingdom nationals, and all indigenous people around the world. He strives to represent Aloha 'Āina, the core principles of Hawaiian natural and cultural stewardship. Along with the Super Groupers, he founded and regularly conducts Soundshop, a hip hop education workshop program with high school students at the Honolulu Museum of Art. He is currently the Learning Programs Coordinator at the Shangri La Museum of Islamic Art, Culture and Design. He is also a poet facilitator and youth mentor for the nonprofit poetry education organization Pacific Tongues, for which he ran a weekly writing workshop on the University of Hawai‘i campus. His latest solo album, Second Language, was also nominated for 2019 Hawai‘i Hip Hop Album of the Year.
Photo courtesy of the artist
jamaica heolimeleikalani osorio
Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio is a Kanaka Maoli wahine artist / activist / scholar born and raised in Pālolo Valley to parents Jonathan and Mary Osorio. Heoli earned her PhD in English (Hawaiian literature) in 2018 from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Currently, Heoli is an Assistant Professor of Indigenous and Native Hawaiian Politics at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. She is a three-time national poetry champion, poetry mentor, published author, and has shared her poetry throughout Oceania, on five of the seven continents, and at the American Whitehouse by invitation of President Obama. She is a proud past Kaiāpuni student, Ford fellow, and a graduate of Kamehameha, Stanford University (BA) and New York University (MA). Her book Remembering our Intimacies: Moʻolelo, Aloha ʻĀina, and Ea is forthcoming with University of Minnesota Press in Fall 2021.
Photo by Elizabeth Soto
Piliamo‘o
Piliāmo‘o (Mark Hamasaki and Kapulani Landgraf), collaboratively, have documented the construction of the H-3 freeway, the water struggle of Waiāhole, and the ahupuaʻa of Kailua.
Kapulani Landgraf was born and raised in Pūʻahuʻula, Kāneʻohe. Landgraf’s books, Nā Wahi Pana o Koʻolau Poko (University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1994) and Nā Wahi Kapu o Maui (Ai Pōhaku Press, 2003), received Ka Palapala Poʻokela awards for Excellence in Illustrative Books in 1995 and 2004, respectively. Kapulani received a 2013 Visual Arts Fellowship from the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation and the 2014 Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Grant. In 1996, the Hawaiʻi State Foundation on Culture and the Arts awarded her an Individual Artist Fellowship in Photography. She is an Associate Professor of Art at Kapiʻolani Community College, but is currently serving as a Title III Project Director.
Photo courtesy of the artist
nikkya taliaferro
Nikkya Taliaferro is a 17-year-old Moanalua High School student. She is the executive director of Hawai'i for Black Lives, a teen advocacy group protesting racial injustice. She hopes to inspire young people to become active in their community.
miwako tezuka
Associate Curator, Hawai‘i Triennial 2022
Miwako Tezuka is associate director of Reversible Destiny Foundation, a progressive artist foundation in New York established by Arakawa and Madeline Gins. Previously, she held the positions of gallery director of Japan Society (2012–15) and curator of Contemporary Art at Asia Society Museum (2005–12). She has curated numerous exhibitions; on Maya Lin, Robert Indiana, Ikeda Manabu, Tenmyouya Hisashi, teamLab, Mariko Mori, U-Ram Choe, Yang Fudong, Chen Chieh-jen, among many others. She also co-curated, with Melissa Chiu, the ground-breaking exhibition Yoshitomo Nara: Nobody’s Fool (Asia Society Museum, 2010). Tezuka holds a doctorate in postwar Japanese art history from Columbia University, and is co-director of PoNJA-GenKon, a global network of postwar Japanese art scholars and curators.
Photo courtesy of Miwako Tezuka
Art Summit Dialogues — Live!
Guest Speakers
Dr. Louise Bernard is the founding Director of the Obama Presidential Center Museum. As a Senior Content Developer and Interpretive Planner in the New York office of the museum design firm Ralph Appelbaum Associates, she worked on the design team that developed the National Museum of African American History and Culture, Smithsonian Institution, along with other national and international projects. She previously served as Director of Exhibitions at the New York Public Library, as Curator of Prose and Drama for the Yale Collection of American Literature at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, and as Assistant Professor of English at Georgetown University. She received her Ph.D. in African American Studies and American Studies from Yale; an M.A. in Theatre History and an M.A. in English Literature from Indiana University, Bloomington; and a B.A. Hons in Drama from the University of Manchester. Her current research engages with the literary archive, material culture, museology, public history, and interpretive planning and design. She serves on the Advisory Council for the Johnson Publishing Company Archive.
Céline Semaan-Vernon is a Lebanese-Canadian designer, writer, advocate and public speaker. She is the founder of Slow Factory Foundation, a 501c3 public service organization working at the intersection of environmental and social justice, which produces a conference series promoting sustainability literacy called Study Hall, and the first science-driven incubator in fashion called One X One. She is on the Council of Progressive International, became a Director's Fellow of MIT Media Lab in 2016, and served on the Board of Directors of AIGA NY, a nonprofit membership organization that helps cultivate the future of design in New York City from 2016-2017.
Nina Tonga is an art historian and Curator Contemporary Art at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. She is from the villages of Vaini and Kolofo’ou in the Kingdom of Tonga and was born and raised in Aotearoa New Zealand. Nina specialises in contemporary art of the Pacific with a focus on time based media and is completing a PhD in Art History at the University of Auckland.
Nina has curated a number exhibitions including solo projects by Nike Savvas, Lemi Ponifasio and Chiharu Shiota. Recent exhibitions include Home AKL (2012) at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, Tonga i Onopooni (2014) at Pataka Art + Museum and Pacific Sisters: Fashion Activists (2018-2019) at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. In 2019, she was the curator of the second iteration of the Honolulu Biennial, To Make Wrong/ Right/ Now.
Dr. Akiemi Glenn is a Honolulu-based scholar and culture worker. She is a linguist who works in Indigenous language revitalization and a filmmaker, artist, and cultural practitioner. Akiemi is also the founder and executive director of the Pōpolo Project, an organization whose mission is to redefine what it means to be Black in Hawai‘i and in the world through cultivating connection between individuals, our communities, our ancestors, and the land, changing what we commonly think of as Local and highlighting the vivid, complex diversity of Black cultures and identities.
Jaimey Hamilton Faris teaches critical theory and the history of contemporary art. She writes and speaks about art and visual culture at the intersection of globalization and climate change, especially in the Asia-Pacific region. She has published articles in Art Journal, October, Invisible Culture, Art Margins, and The Contemporary Pacific. She edited the Fall 2015 special issue of Art Margins on Capitalist Realism. Her 2013 book, Uncommon Goods, explored representations of global commodity chains and transnational trade. Turning her attention to the relationship between global economic "flows" and the earth's own ecological cycles, she has been working on a new project, Liquid Archives. This is a contemporary art historical/art critical book that establishes the growing importance of representing water in an era of climate change.
Josh Tengan is a Honolulu-born and based curator and arts project manager. Since 2015, he has worked with local and Native Hawaiian artists, through the arts nonprofit Pu‘uhonua Society, to deliver Hawai‘i’s largest annual thematic contemporary art exhibition, CONTACT, which offers a critical and comprehensive survey of local contemporary visual culture. He recently served as Assistant Curator of the 2019 Honolulu Biennial. He is a professional arts manager at Nā Mea Hawai‘i, managing public art installations in Honolulu for the past four years. He holds a Curatorial Studies MA with Distinction from Newcastle University (UK) and a BA in Fine Art from Westmont College.
Halona Norton-Westbrook became Director and CEO of the Honolulu Museum of Art in January 2020. Halona was raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, lived for several years in London, England, and comes to Honolulu having most recently spent the last seven years in the Midwest. Halona has an expertise in the formation, history, and evolution of museum collections in the 20th century and in Modern and Contemporary Art. She previously served as Director of Curatorial Affairs and Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Toledo Museum of Art. Prior to that she was the recipient of the Andrew W. Mellon Leadership Fellowship, inaugurated in 2012 to train the next generation of museum leaders. Halona received a B.A. in American History and Studio Art from Mills College, an M.A. in Art History from Courtauld Institute of Art in London, and a Ph.D. in Museology/Art History from the University of Manchester. She and her husband Jim have two daughters, Giovanna and Minerva.
Fumio Nanjo is the esteemed Senior Advisor of the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, where he served as Director from 2006 - 2019. Among his many distinguished roles in the arts, he has served as Director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts in Nagoya (1996-1990), commissioner of the Japan Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (1997), commissioner at the Taipei Biennale (1998), member of jury committee of the Turner Prize (1998), co-curator of the 3rd Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (1999), artistic director of the Yokohama Triennale (2001), jury member of the Golden Lion Prize of the Venice Biennale (2005) and artistic director of the Singapore Biennale (2006, 2008). He also served as curatorial director for the Honolulu Biennial (2017) and is currently an artistic director emeritus for Hawai‘i Contemporary.
Xiaoyu Weng is the Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Associate Curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Weng was appointed to spearhead The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Chinese Art Initiative in 2015. At the Guggenheim, she has co-curated the exhibitions Tales of Our Time (2016–17) and One Hand Clapping (2018). Featuring newly commissioned artworks by thirteen artists and artist collectives, the exhibitions challenge myths of identity and nation-state constructions.
In recent years, Weng’s curatorial, research, and writing projects have been focusing on the exploration of decolonial frameworks by rediscovering cultural technics and notions of cosmologies from historically marginalized practices. In close collaborations with artists, researchers and philosophers, her work intends to create syncretic, interpenetrating and hybrid contexts and platforms to foreground these practices.
Mahalo nui loa to our partners and sponsors
The Hawai‘i Contemporary Art Summit 2021 is proudly presented in partnership with Bishop Museum, Hawai‘i State Art Museum, Honolulu Museum of Art, and The Friends of Iolani Palace, and will be produced in collaboration with NMG Network. The event is generously sponsored, in part, by Hawai‘i State Art Museum, DAWSON, Jonathan Kindred, Taiji and Naoko Terasaki Family Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), The Sidney E. Frank Foundation, and Engaging the Senses Foundation.
To find out more about how NEA grants impact individuals and communities, visit arts.gov.