The Contemporary Museum Biennial Exhibition of HawaiÎi Artists
June 27 - August 31, 2003

This year The Contemporary Museum Biennial Exhibition of HawaiÎi Artists marks its first decade. When the Biennial originated in 1993, it was conceived as an invitational exhibition to complement the large juried exhibitions that take place annually in the Islands and offer a broad overview of contemporary art activity in the State. Over the last ten years, the Biennial exhibition has become an important venue for highlighting a sampling of some of the best recent work by artists living and working in the Islands.

Much anticipated by the art community and the general public, the Biennial has consistently been one of TCMâs most well-attended exhibitions. The exhibitions have fostered a growing appreciation and wider awareness of the significant achievements of Island artists, and the accompanying catalogues have served not only as a document of the exhibitions, but also as a means of disseminating information and promoting interest in the arts of HawaiÎi to the mainland and abroad.

The sixth Biennial exhibition acknowledges the creative accomplishments of six invited artists from around the state, three from OÎahu and one each from HawaiÎi, KauaÎi and Maui. Each artist is provided with a gallery space and is able to show a body of work or to develop a piece in which the contents of the gallery comprise a single work or installation. Visitors to the exhibition thus have an opportunity to appreciate and understand more fully each artistâs sensibility, ideas and techniques.

Collectively, the six artists represent the remarkable range of contemporary expression in HawaiÎi, the diversity of viewpoints, ideas, styles, media and techniques that are flourishing in a place located far from other centers of contemporary art. Drawing their inspiration variously from the place close around them, from the distant world at large, and from inside themselves, these artistsâ respective visions are at once personal and universal.

Three featured artists of the sixth Biennial reside in Honolulu (OÎahu): Kaili Chun, Wayne Morioka and Deborah Gottheil Nehmad. In her installation work, Chun notably by combines a highly refined sense of craftsmanship with conceptual sophistication. Her recent series of vitrines or display cases weave together various strands of reference and meaning. Moriokaâs ceramic masks derive imagery from both spiritual and mundane sources, ranging from television talk-show personalities to members of the Buddhist pantheon. The masksâ shut eyes signify their closure to this world and internal focus on the next/another world. Nehmadâs works on paper are vehicles for a complex and sustained narrative about the body. Her work has moved recently from field to form, in which imprinted numbers concentrate into geometric shapes or coalesce along an implied horizon line.

The sixth Biennial additionally features paintings by Tom Lieber of Koloa (KauaÎi), which often build on a field of closely allied hues against which linear elements play. Leiber works intuitively and is clearly responsive to the specific qualities ö including what he terms the ãliving colorä ö of the Islandsâ natural environment. Walter G. Nottingham of Hilo (HawaiÎi) is known internationally for work that has spanned the spectrum of contemporary fiber art. His current work evokes something deeply sacramental and engages physical fragments, much as did medieval reliquaries, for their power to focus the human spirit in attitudes of devotion and contemplation. Through the genres of painting, sculpture and installation, Michael Takemoto of Kula (Maui) engages with humor and passion in an ongoing critique of contemporary politics that pertain both to the art world and to the world at large. From tiny clustered flecks of ink on sketchbook paper emerge grainy visages of a contemporary pantheon of tyrants that are then translated to large-scale works.

The Contemporary Museum Biennial Exhibition of HawaiÎi Artists is made possible by corporate sponsor Verizon Hawaii, with additional support by the State Foundation on Culture and the Arts, ASTON Waikiki Beachside Hotel and Aloha Airlines. This exhibition is accompanied by a full-color catalogue with essays on each of the artists by Marcia Morse, which will be available for sale in the Museum Shop. Additional catalogue sponsors are Thurston and Sharon Twigg-Smith, Violet and Paul Loo, and Tori Mary Keegan.