55 Artists from Hawaii

Fritz Abplanalp (1907–1977) was a Swiss woodcarver.

Robert Wilson Andrews was a Hawaii-born artist and engineer. His father Lorrin Andrews (1795–1868) was an early American missionary to Hawaii and a judge. Prior to leaving Hawaii in 1859, Robert made a number of finely crafter landscape drawings including renderings of the sacrificial stone at Kolekole Pass, Iao Needle, Kapuʻuohoʻokamoa-Hāmākualoa Falls and Hanapēpē Falls. He studied engineering on the mainland at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, and returned to Hawaii in 1863, where he worked as a sugar mill engineer for 30 years. He remained involved with the church, and spent his retirement years teaching Sunday school.

Mark Arbeit is an American photographer known for his celebrity portraiture, fashion and beauty. His work has appeared in (France) Vogue, Marie Claire, Cosmopolitan, Figaro Madame, (US) Vanity Fair, InStyle, People, Forbes, (Australia) Harper's Bazaar, Vogue

Clarissa Chapman Armstrong was an American missionary in the Hawaiian Islands and Marquesas Islands, from 1832 until 1847. She was part of the Fifth Company of missionaries sent to Hawaii by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM).

John Buck is an American sculptor and printmaker who was born in Ames, Iowa.

Kenneth Wayne Bushnell was an American visual artist, who was born in Los Angeles. He earned a BA from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1958, and then moved to Hawaii, where he received an MFA from the University of Hawaiʻi in 1961. He taught painting at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa from 1961 to 1981, and was appointed chairman of the Art Department in 1991. He married fellow artist Helen Gilbert in 1995. Bushnell is now a professor emeritus, living in Honolulu.

Louis Henri Jean Charlot was a French-born American painter and illustrator, active mainly in Mexico and the United States.

Henry B. Christian (1883–1953) was a painter who was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He studied at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, and first visited Hawaii in 1908. He made frequent trips between Minnesota and Hawaii before settling in Honolulu. Christian was art director of Paradise of the Pacific 1908-10, 1917–19, and 1922–38. He died in Honolulu on December 23, 1953.

Edward Clifford was an English artist and author.

Amelia R. Coats (1877-1967) was an American printmaker known for her small, detailed etchings, mostly from the first quarter of the twentieth century. They consist primarily of Hawaiian landscapes featuring idyllic settings. They are typically undated and without information about the size of the edition. Kiawe and Canoes, in the collection of the Honolulu Museum of Art is typical of her oeuvre.

Chrissy Conant is an American artist who created works such as Chrissy Caviar and Chrissy Skin Rug. Her BioArt works have aroused strong responses and have been a basis for discussions of the body, art, and ethics.

Heather Day is an American a visual artist based in San Francisco, California.

Gideon Jacques Denny (1830–1886) was a marine artist who was born in Wilmington, Delaware on July 15, 1830. As a young man, he worked on ships in the Chesapeake Bay. He traveled to California in 1849 with the Gold Rush. He worked as a teamster on the San Francisco docks and was a member of the San Francisco Committee of Vigilance. After two years in California, he moved to Milwaukee, where he studied painting with Samuel Marsden Brookes. After six years of study in Milwaukee, Denny returned to San Francisco and established a studio on Bush Street. In 1862, Brookes moved to San Francisco and shared a studio with Denny. In 1868, Denny spent two months in Hawaii visiting several islands. He is also known to have visited Canada and South America. Denny died of malaria in Cambria, California on Oct. 7, 1886.

Helen Thomas Dranga (1866–1927), who is also known as Carrie Helen Dranga, was a British/American painter who made paintings of Hawaii.

Arthur Webster Emerson was a painter who was born in Honolulu, Hawaii. He was the son of Nathaniel Bright Emerson, and grandson of missionaries John S. Emerson and Ursula Newell Emerson. As a young Hawaiian-born artist, he was encouraged in his painting by Madge Tennent. During the 1910s and 1920s, he painted in New York with other young artists associated with the Ashcan School. Emerson died in 1968.

Paul Emmert (1826–1867), who is also known as Paul Emert, was an artist born near Berne, Switzerland in 1826. He immigrated to New York City at age 19, where he rapidly became an established artist. He joined the gold rush to California in 1849. The following year he exhibited a panorama of the gold mining activities in Brooklyn, before making his second trip to California late in 1850. While in California, he operated the Bear Hotel in Sacramento and a theater in San Francisco. He exhibited his panorama in San Francisco and other communities.

Robert Lee Eskridge was an American genre painter, muralist and illustrator.

Hugo Anton Fisher was an artist primarily known for painting landscapes in watercolor. He was born into a family of artists in Kladno, Bohemia. In 1874, he immigrated to New York, and in 1886, he moved to Alameda, California with his wife and children. About 1894, Fisher moved to Hawaii and opened a studio in Honolulu, but he left Hawaii for the mainland late in 1896. Fisher died in Alameda, California in 1916.

Helen Gilbert, also known as Helen Gilbert-Bushnell, Helen Odell Gilbert and Helen Odell, was an American artist and art-educator born in Mare Island, California. She earned a baccalaureate in art at Mills College, in California. After graduation, she moved to Honolulu, where she married Honolulu physician Fred Gilbert. In 1968, she received an MFA degree from the University of Hawaii at Manoa, and then remained on the faculty for 30 years. Her second marriage was to fellow artist Kenneth Wayne Bushnell in 1995. She had also been a visiting professor at Parsons The New School for Design and the Pratt Institute. She died at home of cancer on April 8, 2002.

Alfred Richard Gurrey Sr. (1852–1944) was an English-born landscape painter who moved to the United States at age 20. In 1900, his employer, Fireman's Fund Insurance Company, transferred him from San Francisco to Hawaii. In Hawaii, he worked as an insurance adjuster and was secretary of the Board of Fire Underwriters of the Territory of Hawaii. Although without formal art training, he painted Hawaiian landscapes and opened an art and antiques store in Honolulu. Gurrey was a member of the Kilohana Art League. In 1916, he retired from the Board of Fire Underwriters and moved to Kauai, where he continued to paint. His son, Alfred Richard Gurrey Jr. (1874–1928) and daughter-in-law, Caroline Haskins Gurrey (1875–1927), were photographers active in Hawaii.

Raymond Han is an American painter who was born in Honolulu, Hawaii in 1931, and died in upstate New York in 2017. After study with Willson Young Stamper (1912–1988) at the Honolulu Museum of Art, Han moved to New York City and studied at the Art Students League of New York with Frank Mason and Robert Beverly Hale (1901–1985). Han lived and worked in upstate New York for the last period of his working life.

Theodore C. Heuck (1830–1877) was an architect, a merchant, and a painter. He designed The Queen's Medical Center, the Royal Mausoleum of Hawaii in 1865, and ʻIolani Barracks in 1871.

Allen Hutchinson was an English sculptor.

Kaʻiulani was the only child of Princess Miriam Likelike, and the last heir apparent to the throne of the Hawaiian Kingdom. She was the niece of King Kalākaua and Queen Liliʻuokalani. After the death of her mother, Princess Kaʻiulani was sent to Europe at age 13 to complete her education under the guardianship of British businessman and Hawaiian sugar investor Theo H. Davies. She had not yet reached her eighteenth birthday when the 1893 overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom altered her life. The Provisional Government of Hawaii rejected pleas from both her father Archibald Scott Cleghorn, and provisional president Sanford B. Dole, to seat Kaʻiulani on the throne, conditional upon the abdication of Liliʻuokalani. The Queen thought the Kingdom's best chance at justice was to relinquish her power temporarily to the United States.

Herbert Kawainui Kāne, considered one of the principal figures in the renaissance of Hawaiian culture in the 1970s, was a celebrated artist-historian and author with a special interest in the seafaring traditions of the ancestral peoples of Hawaiʻi. Kāne played a key role in demonstrating that Hawaiian culture arose not from some accidental seeding of Polynesia, but that Hawaiʻi was reachable by voyaging canoes from Tahiti able to make the journey and return. This offered a far more complex notion of the cultures of the Pacific Islands than had previously been accepted. Furthermore, he created vivid imagery of Hawaiian culture prior to contact with Europeans, and especially the period of early European influence, that sparked appreciation of a nearly forgotten traditional life. He painted dramatic views of war, exemplified by The Battle at Nuʻuanu Pali, the potential of conflicts between cultures such as in Cook Entering Kealakekua Bay, where British ships are dwarfed and surrounded by Hawaiian canoes, as well as bucolic quotidian scenes and lush images of a robust ceremonial and spiritual life, that helped arouse a latent pride among Hawaiians during a time of general cultural awakening.

The Kilohana Art League was formed in 1894 as Honolulu’s first art association. On May 5, 1894, the woodcarver Augusta Graham, the sculptor Allen Hutchinson, and painters D. Howard Hitchcock and Annie H. Park created a forum where local artists could exhibit together and share ideas. Other members included Alfred Richard Gurrey, Sr. and Bessie Wheeler.

Robert Kobayashi (1925–2015) was a Hawaiʻi-born artist who made abstract expressionist paintings at the beginning of his career and later produced pointillist paintings and pointillist-derived sculptures in the folk art tradition. Known for the "whimsical, childlike quality" of his work, he rarely exhibited in commercial galleries, preferring to work and display his creations in a studio called "Moe's Meat Market" that he and his wife owned in the NoLita section of Manhattan.

Ron Leory Kowalke was an American painter, printmaker, sculptor, and art educator born in Chicago. He attended the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Chicago, but earned his BA from Rockford University in 1959. He received an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 1960. He taught at Northern Illinois University and the Swain School of Design before joining the faculty of the University of Hawaii. He taught in Hawaii from 1969 until his retirement as a professor emeritus in 2000.

Gwen Lux Creighton professionally Gwen Lux, (1908–1986) was an American sculptor known for her abstraction and frequently constructed from polyester resin concrete and metals. She was among America’s pioneer women sculptors.

Genevieve Springston Lynch (1891–1960), also known as Gene Lynch, was an American painter and art teacher who taught and worked in Hawaii.

Eli Raphael Marozzi (1913–1999) was a sculptor, ceramist, teacher, and illustrator.

Frank Montague Moore (1877–1967) was a painter and the first director of the Honolulu Museum of Art. He was born November 24, 1877 in Taunton, England, and studied at the Liverpool Art School and the Royal Institute. He immigrated to the United States and took additional painting lessons from Henry Ward Ranger. In 1910, he moved from New York City to Hawaii, where he worked as a purchasing agent for Hawaii Plantations. He became the first director of the Honolulu Museum of Art in 1924, but resigned in 1927, shortly before the museum opened. In 1928, he left Hawaii for California, where he painted 41 murals collectively known as the Picture Bridge for the Huntington Hotel in Pasadena and many easel paintings of California landscapes. Moore died in Carmel, California on March 5, 1967.

Hiroki Morinoue is an American artist of Japanese descent who has helped to pioneer in the United States the fusion of western Impressionism with modern Japanese design.

Ben Norris (1910–2006) was an American modernist painter.

Jerry T. Okimoto was a Japanese-American painter and sculptor who was born in Waianae, Hawaii.

Kat Reederis a Peruvian-American illustrator, portrait artist, and graphic designer whose work is characterized by attractive female forms and nostalgic scenery, often heavily inspired by the tropics. Her work combines elements of pop art, animation, art nouveau, and Latin American art styles. Reeder was born in Lima, Peru, grew up in Miami, Florida, and now lives in Honolulu, HI.

Mamoru Sato is an American modernist sculptor. He was born in El Paso, Texas in 1937. He initially majored in aeronautical engineering but switched to art, receiving a BA in fine art in 1963 and an MFA in sculpture in 1965, both from the University of Colorado. He taught at the University of Hawaii at Manoa in 1965. During the summer of 1969, he worked with Tony Smith at UH. Smith titled a piece in his For... series for Sato: For M.S.

Tadashi Sato was an American artist. He was born in Kaupakalua on the Hawaiian island of Maui. His father had been a pineapple laborer, merchant, and calligrapher, and Tadashi’s grandfather was a sumi-e artist.

Lloyd Sexton Jr. (1912–1990), who is also known as Leo Lloyd Sexton Jr. was an American painter born in Hilo, Hawaii on March 24, 1912. In 1931 he entered the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. In 1933 he had a show of flower paintings at the Vose Galleries in Boston, followed by exhibitions at the Honolulu Museum of Art and at Gump's in San Francisco. He spent several years in Europe, painting and traveling during the summers and studying at the Slade School of Art in London during the winters. In his third and final year of instruction there, one of his figure paintings won first prize, and in 1936 a flower painting was exhibited the Royal Academy in London. Sexton returned to Hilo in 1937 and concentrated on figure painting and portraiture. That same year his painting "Nanea" was accepted and exhibited at the Royal Academy. Sexton executed a large number of portraits and, beginning in 1934, before he left for Europe, did two commissions for the Hawaiian Pineapple Company. He was a frequent and popular exhibitor in group shows in Honolulu. He also had one-person shows at Honolulu's Grossman-Moody Gallery in 1957 and at the Hilton Hawaiian Village Hotel Gallery in 1961. A retrospective of his work was held at the Contemporary Arts Center, Honolulu Advertiser Gallery, in 1966. He died in Honolulu on March 23, 1990

Ada May Sharpless was an American artist and sculptor.

Frank Sheriff is an abstract sculptor who was born in Yokohama, Japan to an American father and a Japanese-American mother. Because his father was employed by the United States Army, Frank lived in Japan, Nevada, California, New York, Texas, North Carolina, and Hawaii during his childhood. He started studying art at Oregon State University but returned to Hawaii to be with his mother when his father died in 1980. He entered the University of Hawaii at Manoa, where he earned a BFA in 1984, and an MFA in 1989.

Ken Shutt was an American sculptor and watercolorist who was born in Long Beach, California. He grew up in Whittier, California, and graduated from Pasadena City College, the Art Center College of Design and the Chouinard Art Institute. He moved to Hawaii in 1963, and lived there until 1995. He returned to California in 1995, to be near his foundry, when he was commissioned to create a bronze sculpture for the entrance of Sea Life Park Hawaii. He died 2010, at age 81, in Atascadero, California.

Isabella McHutcheson Sinclair was a Scottish born botanist, author and botanical illustrator. Her best known work is the 1885 book Indigenous flowers of the Hawaiian islands, the first book published with colour images of Hawaiian flowering plants.

Kelly Sueda is a painter who was born and raised in Hawaii. He received a BFA from the Academy of Art College in San Francisco and the University of San Francisco. He has shown his paintings in both solo and group shows in Hawaii and on the mainland. Kelly Sueda lives and works in Hawaii, and his work is in the collection of the Honolulu Museum of Art.

Jason Jun Teraoka is a figurative painter who was born in Kapaʻa, Hawaiʻi. He is a fourth-generation Japanese-American who lives and works in Honolulu, and is largely self-taught. In 2000, he received the Hawaii State Foundation on Culture and the Arts Arts Acquisition Award, and in 2001 he received the Reuben Tam Award for Painting from the Honolulu Museum of Art.

Masami Teraoka is an American contemporary artist. His work includes Ukiyo-e-influenced woodcut prints and paintings in watercolor and oil.

Harry Suyemi Tsuchidana is an American abstract painter. He was born in Waipahu, Hawaii to parents who owned a two-acre farm. Tsuchidana enlisted in the United States Marine Corps upon graduation from high school in 1952. When discharged from the Marines in 1955, he enrolled in the Corcoran School of Art. He then moved to New York City, where he studied at the Brooklyn Museum Art School, and at the Pratt Contemporary Graphic Arts Center in New York City. While enrolled in classes, he worked as a guard and custodian at the Corcoran Gallery of Art and as a night watchman at the Museum of Modern Art. In 1959, he received a John Hay Whitney Fellowship.

Ralph Burke Tyree was an American artist of the 20th century who had a prolific career painting scenes from the South Pacific. His love of the islands was sparked as a U.S. Marine during World War II when he was posted to Samoa. After the war, he split his years between California and the Pacific, capturing the exoticism of island people and landscapes in oil on board and black velvet.

Greta Mae "Puanani" Kanemura Van Dorpe (1933–2014) was an American artist and master of kapa, the Hawaiian art of making cloth from bark fibers. Van Dorpe spent more than forty years researching the forgotten craft of making kapa, investigating the tools and materials used by ancient Hawaiians and experimenting to replicate the cloth. She has been credited as one of the women responsible for reviving the art of kapa in the 1970s.

Dietrich Varez was an iconoclastic printmaker-painter. His work is among the most widely recognized of any artist in Hawaii. A long-time resident of the Big Island, he is known primarily for scenes of Hawaiian mythology and of traditional Hawaiian life and stylized designs from nature.

John Webber was an English artist who accompanied Captain Cook on his third Pacific expedition. He is best known for his images of Australasia, Hawaii and Alaska.

Henry Otto Wix (1866–1922), also known as Otto Wix, was a German-born landscape and portrait painter who emigrated to the United States in the late 1890s. He studied in New York, but visited Hawaii in 1907 and 1908–9. About 1910, he moved to San Francisco, but visited Hawaii again in 1912. He also made several sketching trips to Mexico. Wix's marriage ended in divorce, resulting in depression and alcoholism. He died by his own hand in Santa Barbara, California on March 13, 1922.

Anna Woodward (1868–1935) was an American painter who was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1868. She studied painting at the Académie Julian in Paris with Tony Robert-Fleury, Jules Joseph Lefebvre, and William-Adolphe Bouguereau, and also with George Hitchcock in Holland. By 1918, she moved to Hawaii from Paris with a studio near Waikiki. She was influenced by the impressionist movement, creating landscape portraits. During the 1920s and 1930s she produced illustrations and paintings for Paradise of the Pacific. Woodward died in Honolulu in 1935.

Robert Yasuda is an American abstract painter, most known for contemplative, atmospheric works that straddle painting, sculpture and architecture. He first attracted wide attention in the 1970s for large wall works merging painting and installation art, mounted at MoMA PS1, the Corcoran Museum of Art, and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Since the 1990s, he has focused on paintings that disrupt conventional formats using hand-carved wood panels and custom framing elements, upon which he builds multi-layered iridescent surfaces that respond dynamically to shifting conditions of light, time and vantage. Reviewing this later work, ARTnews critic Barbara MacAdam described Yasuda as a "romantic minimalist" whose paintings present an intangible, fleeting reality that is nonetheless referential, showing his roots in their construction, shifting tones and titles.

Tseng Yu-ho, who is also known as Betty Ecke, was an artist, art historian and educator.