Curator Noelle M.K.Y. Kahanu Shares Her Top Five Recent Obsessions

Many of Sonya Kelliher-Combs’s works are about the prevalence of suicide in Alaska Native communities. She has a series called “Idiot Strings,” referring to the cord that connects a pair of mittens. A prominent feature of her work, the strings evoke a kind of body form, as one might imagine them hanging around someone’s neck; the idiot strings, suspended in the air and lit so as to cast shadows, seem to indicate the presence of what once was. The shadows are a reminder of people’s continuing presence here with us, their impact and their legacy. Not only are the works really tender, they serve as an opportunity for connection as viewers consider this relevant and widespread issue within the Native communities.

Rocky Jensen was a contemporary Native Hawaiian artist who passed away by his own hand in 2023. As a carver and illustrator, he started an organization in 1975 called Hale Naua III, through which he tried to push for a new form of visual language for Native Hawaiians that allowed freedom to express one’s indigeneity through material alternatives. He took this kind of liberty in his own work for 50 years, but people weren’t ready for such non- or post-traditional thinking. One work of his is an akua hulu manu based on a feathered god image made of wood. This one, however, is about three feet tall and has little silver teeth in homage to his grandson, who lost his own when he was young.

Educator, philosopher, and author Manulani Meyer’s 2018 book Ho‘oulu: Our Time of Becoming touches on the idea of e pluribus unum and the drive to homogenize those who live within our borders. It’s important to think more deeply about how, by recognizing and honoring our differences, we can see the humanity in each of us. As we plan the Hawai‘i Triennial, we have been thinking about not just centering the triennial in Hawaii, at the edge of the US, but in the Pacific, as the center of this Pacific core, meaning Pacific Asia and beyond.

In Hawaii, a pewa, or butterfly patch, not only heals a fracture but beautifies the object in which it occurred. The point is not to hide that the break happened, but to mend it. The presence of a pewa also means that whatever the object is, it is treasured and worth fixing. And it’s fixed for the purpose of continuity in its life. But there was a reason the original cracked or broke, and, as a result, the pewa has to be made of stronger material. I’ve been thinking about pewas in relation to artists and how they identify communal and global fractures in their work. Using art as a way of addressing pain and injustice to draw our attention and, hopefully, action, can help heal these fissures and societal cracks.

The US model has been to repatriate under the law NAGPRA, but when we force people to do the right thing it’s not transformative. Internationally, there have been opportunities to restitute material culture and human remains outside these legal requirements. For example, when Captain Cook came to Hawaii, he was gifted a cloak from Chief Kalani‘ōpu‘u. He took it off his shoulders and put it on Cook’s. It was an honest gift. More than 200 years later, the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa decided the cloak belongs home. I think we need to get away from this idea of museums as a dead end as opposed to a way station.