Lehuauakea

Breathing New Life Into the Ancestral Art of Kapa

Lehuauakea is a māhū mixed-Native Hawaiian interdisciplinary artist and kapa maker from Pāpaʻikou on Moku O Keawe, the Big Island of Hawaiʻi. Through a range of traditional Kanaka Maoli craft-based media, their art serves as a means of exploring cultural and biological ecologies, Indigenous identity, and contemporary environmental degradation.

Kapa, traditionally made from wauke (paper mulberry), is a bark cloth adorned with a range of textures, patterns and colors. The process of making kapa is arduous, involving gathering, striping, pounding, and dying the cloth. Due to colonization and assimilation, many traditional kapa patterns have been lost. Lehuauakea works with some traditional older patterns, but also innovates by creating new designs.

With a particular focus on the labor-intensive making of ʻohe kāpala (carved bamboo printing tools), kapa (bark cloth), and natural pigments, Lehua is able to breathe new life into patterns and traditions practiced for generations. Through these acts of resilience that help forge deeper relationships with ʻāina, this mode of Indigenous storytelling is carried well into the future. They have participated in several solo and group shows around the Pacific Ocean, and recently opened their first curatorial research project, DISplace, at the Five Oaks Museum in Portland, Oregon.

Lehuauakea is nominated by the Museum of International Folk Art to represent the United States.