Melissa Chimera with Gene Dumaran (her uncle). This project celebrates her Filipino heritage and the Pu’unene HC&S sugar mill where her grandmother’s family worked on Maui.
Michael Clements with Maui County Council member Gladys Baisa. Many people in her family have been influenced both socially and economically by the Sugar Industry over the years and by it’s eminent demise.
Betty Hay Freeland with Scott Fisher, Director of Conservation, Hawaiian Island Land Trust. Interested in portraying landscape with a history that the public isn’t aware of. Nu’u, in Maui’s south east Kaupo district, is a wahi pana, a place of myths, legends and stories.
Carmen Gardner with Brian Sato. Fostering awareness of the historical and cultural significance of the island of Kaho’olawe.
About this video
This video follows four collaborations from the Reaching Out exhibit. Melissa Chimera, working with her uncle Gene Dumaran, traces her family’s story from a 1929 ship manifest — her grandfather arriving in Honolulu Harbor on the Fourth of July — to “The Last Harvest,” a glowing red oil painting of cane workers that honors the dignity within the hardship of plantation labor, patterned with the damask of a Filipino barong tagalog. Michael Clements invited Maui County Council member Gladys Baisa — granddaughter of a plantation locomotive driver — to paint freely on small canvases, which he cut apart and reassembled, crazy-quilt style, into a vibrant sugar mill scene celebrating an industry at its end.
Betty Hay Freeland painted Nu’u in Maui’s arid Kaupō district with Hawai’i Land Trust’s Dr. Scott Fisher, who describes its petroglyphs, village sites, and spring-fed coastal wetlands — a wahi pana, a storied place, inhabited since around 1500. And Carmen Gardner painted from photographs by Brian Sato, who has volunteered on Kaho’olawe, to foster awareness of the island’s cultural significance and its slow restoration after decades as a bombing range.
