Tiger Tales: Finding the keystone artwork for Home of the Tigers

This is the first in a series of stories that take you behind the scenes of the exhibition Home of the Tigers: McKinley High and Modern Art, on view through Jan. 12, 2025. 
 
To select works for the exhibition Home of the Tigers: McKinley High and Modern Art, co-curators Alejandra Rojas Silva and Tyler Cann made many visits to artists, families of artists, and collectors. They were looking for key pieces that helped tell the story of the impact a single high school had on visual art in Hawai‘i.

One day, they were at the Kāne‘ohe home of artist Imaikalani Kalahele and his wife Eunice. “We were going through a garden shed as well as the house, looking at what works were available and thinking about what might end up in the exhibition,” says Cann. Towards the end of the day, as they were wrapping pieces back up to be returned to storage, Kalahele disappeared for a moment, Cann recalls.

“He reappeared in the garden with a vase in his hands and said ‘I made this at McKinley,’” says Cann. “Uncle Imai bringing out something that he had actually made in high school was a super special moment, and we immediately knew it was going to go into the show. In some ways it made the whole exhibition make sense.”

Subsequently, Cann and Rojas Silva selected Geode, a ceramic form by Charlie Higa—Kalahele’s high school art teacher—to create a visual conversation in the gallery between instructor and student. It is placed near the untitled vase Kalahele made in high school. 

You can see the similar earth tones of the glazes, the shared rough-hewn working of the clay and organic shapes. There is a connection. “We kind of reverse engineered that one,” says Cann. He and Rojas Silva hope that visitors see visual bonds like this in the gallery, and get a feel for why one thing is next to another.