University Of Hawai'i Art Gallery - CURRENT & COMING EXHIBITS

UNIVERSITY ART GALLERIES:

The Art Gallery, Commons Gallery,

and the John Young Museum of Art

UNIVERSITY OF HAWAI'I AT MĀNOA

Jean Charlot as Critic: Art in Hawaiʻi, 1950--1970

August 27 -- December 3, 2023

John Young Museum of Art, University of Hawai'i at Mānoa

Exhibition Opening Reception: 2:00 -- 4:00 PM, Sunday, August 27, 2023 Location: John Young Museum of Art, Krauss Hall, UH Mānoa

While Jean Charlot is best known as a painter and educator, the exhibition Jean Charlot as Critic: Art in Hawai‘i, 1950--1970, focuses on the local art he wrote about for the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, Honolulu's newspaper of record. In a city without many other active art critics, Charlot's account provides some of the only written record of Honolulu's emergent art scene during the decades following World War Two. Many of the artists he wrote about at length would comprise the first edition of the iconic Artists of Hawai‘i (1974), including Isami Doi, Kenneth Bushnell, Juliette May Fraser, Sueko Kimura, Ben Norris, Louis Pohl, Shirley Russell, Tadashi Sato, Edward Stasack, and Tseng Yu-Ho.

Charlot's criticism documents the flourishing of institutional and private exhibitions in the 1950s, and the explosion of an independent Honolulu gallery scene during the early 1960s through reviews of new exhibition spaces including Gima's, Arthur Trask's The Collector's Gallery, Loring's, and Storm's. We also see the rise of the notion of the "Kama‘āina" artist and the "Artists of Hawai‘i," terms which still have currency today. Charlot's scope as a local critic was omnivorous--he ran the art page each Wednesday and there he reviewed traveling museum exhibitions, juried amateur shows, exhibitions of children's art, and annual themed exhibitions like Flora Pacific. As a critic, Charlot was an enthusiast rather than a nay-sayer, and was almost always positive, shining the light of a good review on dozens of small exhibitions that might have gone overlooked by the Honolulu public. He believed in the possibility of art in Hawai‘i, and saw it as his role to document the growing scene. In documenting local art and writing about it each week for decades, Charlot's criticism shaped the very idea of art in Hawai‘i.

This exhibition is curated by Dr. Maika Pollack, Director and Chief Curator of the John Young Museum and University Galleries, on leave Fall 2023. Thanks to the John Young Foundation for its generous support of this exhibition. Thanks to Joyce Okano, Harry Oda, Fred Tanaka, Deborah Young, Heidi Berman, Juli Kimura Walters, Sandra Pohl, Judith Nelson and Paul Wagner, Mark Fukunaga, Ann Benson Reidy, H. Brian Moore, the Phil and Marcia Samulski Collection, the Roger and Masako Bellinger Collection, Gregory Dunn, Larry Rowland, the State Foundation on Culture and The Arts, and the Howard Hughes Foundation. Thanks also to the staff of the University Galleries and John Young Museum of Art: Debra Drexler, Acting Director, Sheika Alghezawi, Assistant Director, David Kiyabu, Gallery Exhibition Coordinator, Mia Zheng, Curatorial Graduate Assistant, Hala Megahy, Installation Graduate Assistant, Kai Higuchi, Olivia Ambo, Roland Longstreet, Junco Sato Pollack, and the staff of the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa.

https://hawaii.edu/art/exhibitions-events-museum/

Honolulu New Painting Invitational

August 27 -- October 22, 2023

The Art Gallery, University of Hawai'i at Mānoa

Exhibition Opening Reception: 2:00 -- 4:00 PM, Sunday, August 27, 2023 Location: Art Building, UH Mānoa

This sprawling survey of painters in our 4,200 square foot main art gallery is an unprecedented exhibition embodying the diversity and energy of contemporary painting in Honolulu today. The show affirms our commitment to living art and the ever-changing and resilient metropolitan Honolulu art community. We can see themes of ecological crisis, sublime natural beauty, urban blight, colonial history, stymied supply chains, and the cultural complexities and contradictions that characterize contemporary Honolulu. Says Debra Drexler, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa Painting Professor and Acting Gallery Director, "The work does not come to easy closure, but is guided by experimentation and risk." John Koga, one of Hawai'i's most established contemporary artists, writes, "Having had the pleasure of being immersed in Honolulu's culinary, music, fashion, dance, and visual arts community, I have met passionate creatives in their respective fields. This painting exhibition showcases some of Hawaiʻi's best artists and mentors to our next generation." The vitality of new art is a constant and powerful force in cities, redefining urban spaces while in turn changing with time. In this show we celebrate painting today in Honolulu. Curated by John Koga, Debra Drexler and Maika Pollack.

Participating Artists

Jamie Allen, Herman Pi'ikea Clark, Peter Cole, Solomon Enos, Ka-Ning Fong, Kathleen C. Grennan, Jeff Gress, Kamea Hadar, Tommy Hite,

Christina May Ho, Kathleen Jacobs, Matthew James, Eduardo Joaquin, Alina Kawai, Amber Khan, Sanit Khewhok, Kalani Largusa, Kenny Lui,

Roland Longstreet, Katherine Love, Nanea Lum, Martin Machado, Laura Margulies, Emily McIlroy, Janetta Napp, Stephen Niles

Hadley Nunes, Kana Ogawa, Roxy & Matt Ortiz, Saumolia Puapuaga, Kamran Samimi, Travis Sasaki, Lawrence Seward, Kelly Sueda,

Marc Thomas, Tiffany Torre, Tom Walker

https://hawaii.edu/art/exhibitions-events-museum/

Address, Hours, Admission:

The Art Gallery and Commons Gallery University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa
2535 McCarthy Mall, Honolulu, Hawai'i 96822 (UH Mānoa campus)

Tue. -- Fri, & Sun. 12:00 p.m. -- 4:00 p.m.

Free admission

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