Artists creating and exploring the possibilities arising from collaborating with family members who are videographers and contractors, or one’s own child, or working with a couple of students from Paris and New York, then a healer or a well-known biologist whose work focuses on preserving the native environment, a local architect interested in the history of local Hawaiian architecture, and finally with a poet exploring the deeper meaning of the “Aloha Spirit”…
About this video
The full tour of the Reaching Out exhibit, in the collaborators’ own voices. A fiber artist who felts wool and beats kapa worked with biologist Dr. Art Medeiros, who has spent decades restoring Maui’s native forest — “the last survivors of old Maui” — producing “Mālama” and “Rarer than Gold,” a kapa portrait of a young girl holding rare native fruit, an image of hope that the forest and its children will grow up together. Silk painter Kudra Clover collaborated with her doctor of Chinese medicine on “Galaxia,” letting the Tao guide spirals that are at once microscopic sea creatures and galaxies.
Elsewhere in the show: a mother-daughter pair paint side by side, masks and lace and generations flowing between them (“It took Picasso a lifetime to learn to draw like a child”); painter George Allen, his stepson, and a filmmaking daughter-and-son-in-law team build a koi pond whose painted lily pads float on a video screen; Joëlle C. mentors two young artists — a RISD student and her 13-year-old goddaughter from Paris — into a Kandinsky-inspired chronicle of a Maui summer; a married artist duo honors Auntie Pilahi Pakī’s Aloha Spirit Law — kindness, unity, agreeableness, humility, patience — in layered paintings carrying hidden messages on their backs; and Terry Lopez collaborates with a young Maui-born architect, embedding his sketchbook “thought bubbles” and drawings in encaustic wax the colors of ocean, cane field, and red dirt.
