Recent Acquisitions of Works by Hawai‘i Artists
February 20 – May 2, 2004

In conjunction with the celebration of The Contemporary Museum’s fifteenth anniversary, TCM presents Recent Acquisitions of Works by Hawai‘i Artists. This exhibition highlights many of the works by Hawai‘i artists that TCM has acquired through gift and purchase in the past five years, since its tenth anniversary in 1998.

The Contemporary Museum collection actually began twenty years before the Museum’s 1988 opening in Makiki Heights. In 1968, the then Contemporary Arts Center accessioned its first works, five paintings donated by the Honolulu Advertiser Collection at Persis Corporation. Among those works were Tadashi Sato’s Captain’s Chair and Isami Doi’s Distant Hills, which remain key works in TCM’s representation of the development of contemporary art in Hawai‘i.

The following year, in 1969, the Honolulu Advertiser/Persis bestowed a larger gift of works by Hawai‘i artists upon CAC, with additional gifts in the 1970s and in 1983, when over 500 works were donated. By TCM’s opening in 1988, gifts from the Honolulu Advertiser/Persis collection and individual donors brought the total number of works in TCM’s collection to over 900.

The majority of the works in the Honolulu Advertiser/Persis collection had been purchased from exhibitions at the Honolulu Advertiser Gallery beginning in 1961, the year it opened. The Honolulu Advertiser/Persis gifts endowed TCM with a significant core collection that provides an overview of contemporary art in Hawai‘i from the 1960s through the1980s. Through the generosity of many donors of works of art and purchase funds, TCM has continued to build upon this aspect of the collection since 1988, and today over half of the 2500 works in the Museum’s collection are by Hawai‘i artists.

This exhibition presents over 70 works by 50 artists, with many of the works being exhibited for the first time at TCM. Among the works on view are paintings, drawings, sculpture and prints from the 1940s to the 1970s by Isami Doi, Ralph Iwamoto, John Kelly, Juliette May Fraser, Tadashi Sato, Winifred Hudson, Tohisko Takaezu, Tseng Yuho and Satoru Abe, including his major sculpture Twin Trees, which was the cover image of TCM’s Abe retrospective catalogue.

Also on view are works purchased with funds from two grants made by the Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation in 1999 and 2002, including works by Sally French, Charles Cohan, Kapulani Landgraf, Mark Hamasaki, Sanit Khewhok, Katherine Love, David Graves, Deborah Nehmad and Yida Wang, as well as Gaye Chan’s installation, Chimaera, which was last exhibited in Artists of Hawai‘i 2001.