Art in Conversation • Art + Activism in Hawai'i
Join us as local artists Sean Connelly, Nanea Lum, and Kauwila Mahi discuss the intersections of art and activism in their respective art practices with artist and art writer Sonny Ganaden. Set against the backdrop of Hawaiʻi Triennial 2022 at Hawaiʻi State Art Museum — which examines artistic currents of resistance in the last 50 years in Hawaiʻi — this conversation is a continuation of past movements, bringing them to the present moment.
SAT • NOV 19 • 2PM
Hawai‘i State Art Museum
250 South Hotel St., Second Floor
Diamond Head Gallery
FREE
Dr. Sean Connelly is an artist in Honolulu, O‘ahu where he/they were born and still lives and works. Sean creates work that focuses on material, place, and time. Sean works primarily in sculpture, architecture, land use planning, cartography, new media, installation, and land art. Through their work Sean smartly creates clarity around the physical and spiritual conditions of the built environment. Sean engages the built environment and its effects on their community to decolonize and address the traumas of settler colonialism, militarization, and modernism embedded physically in the environment in architecture and in everyday life. Through their own oral history and unique geo-perception of the environment, Sean aims to liberate the experiences that transform individual and collective responsibility into real sensation, cognition, intergenerational transfer, genealogy, deep ecology, global positioning, mystic alignment, healing, futurism, spatial justice—the list continues onward in conversation. Sean currently serves as an adjunct assistant professor at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation and has designed and taught courses at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, and Harvard University.
Nanea Lum is a Native Hawaiian artist is based in Honolulu. Her research-based practice ranges from kapa (beaten Hawaiian wauke fiber) to large-scale oil paintings. In her kapa-making practice, she personally harvests and processes wauke and uses inks she makes from charcoal, earth pigments, and plants. Her paintings are abstract land- and ocean-scapes that apply cultural concepts of creation, bridging the worlds between creation and creating. Nanea is a graduate of the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa in the Masters of Fine Arts program of the Department of Art and Art History. Her areas of specialization include Hawaiian traditional craft techniques, art decolonization, and applying methods of place-based learning and Indigenous knowledges. Nanea works with community organizations in Hawai‘i, producing projects and building networks that connect Hawaiian learning pathways with ‘āina (land resources).
Daniel Kauwila Mahi is an ʻŌiwi Hawaiʻi visual artist, street scholar, political organizer, researcher, video game designer, and composer from Honolulu, Hawaiʻi. Kauwila’s work embodies genealogical rhythms of sovereignty, solidarity, ceremony, and contested governance through ancestral ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi materials. His work is primarily focused on pre-colonial governance and anti-colonial praxis where they interpolate and remix ancestral chants, stories, acoustemologies, and instrumentation underscoring the rhythm of the underbelly of Hawaiʻi.
Rep. Sonny Ganaden represents Kalihi, Pearl Harbor, Hickam, and has been in office since 2020. He is an artist, writer, and attorney outside of elected office. As a member of the Honolulu printmakers since 2004, he has received awards in honor of John Chin Young and Jean Charlot; and was the Orvis artist in residence with the Honolulu Museum of Art in 2016. In 2017, he was named Best Writer by the Hawaii Society of Professional Journalists for articles in Hana Hou and Flux magazines. He served as board member of Honolulu Biennial Foundation, 2014–2019. From 2017 to the present, he has worked as a director and mentor at the Kalihi Valley Instructional Bike Exchange, a program that incorporates Pacific Islander culture for youth in public housing. In office, he advances law that negates the impacts of the justice system on native and immigrant communities, and advances environmental protection and economic equality.
