Past exhibitions

Home of the Tigers: McKinley High and Modern Art

The exhibition Home of the Tigers: McKinley High and Modern Art  explores the impact of a single high school on visual art in Hawaiʻi.

Past exhibition

Kenyatta Kelechi: Laulima

Hawaiʻi-based artist Kenyatta Kelechi (b. 1990) uses the 19th-century technique of wet plate collodion photography to examine concepts of Indigenous identity and connection to family and place.

Past exhibition

After the Revolution: Modern Mexican Prints

Featuring rarely seen work from HoMA’s collection, After the Revolution focuses on some of the most significant figures of Mexican Modernism, the so-called Tres Grandes (Three Greats): Diego Rivera (1886–1957), José Clemente Orozco (1883–1949), and David Alfaro Siqueiros (1898–1974). Together, they helped define post-revolution Mexican identity.

Past exhibition

Go Tigers

In a nod to the exhibition Home of the Tigers: McKinley High and Modern Art, HoMA presents an artistic celebration of the tiger.

Past exhibition

Views from Within: Photographs from the Collection

This selection of eleven photographs, drawn from the museum and community collections, brings together images depicting intimate interior spaces.

Past exhibition

Fashioning Aloha

On view through September 1, 2024. Aloha wear is more than flowers. Spanning almost 90 years, Fashioning Aloha showcases the diversity and inspiration of design motifs in aloha wear—holokū (gowns), mu‘umu‘u, holomū (dresses), and aloha shirts.

Past exhibition

Ke Kumu Aupuni

This exhibition celebrates the important publication of the same name by Samuel Mānaiakalani Kamakau. On view will be 19th-century drawings, prints, and paintings that appear in the book and that tell layered, complex stories.

Past exhibition

Forward Together

Forward Together celebrates HoMA’s major acquisition of prints from the Jean and Robert Steele Collection, which vastly increases HoMA’s representation of art by Black artists.

Past exhibition

Kapulani Landgraf: ‘Au‘a

To mark the anniversary of the 1893 overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom, the museum presents Kapulani Landgraf’s powerful installation of large photographic portraits of 108 Kānaka ‘Ōiwi community leaders bearing these words from Dr. Haunani-Kay Trask’s historic 1993 speech: We Are Not American He Hawaiʻi Mau a Mau.

Past exhibition

Disasters of War Then and Now

HoMA pairs prints from the series The Disasters of War (1810–1820) by Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes (1746–1828) with recently acquired works by contemporary artist Enrique Chagoya (born in Mexico City, 1953)

Past exhibition

Navid Sinaki: The Infinite Garden

Inspired by the mythological works of Persian poets Ferdowsi (940–c.1025) and Nizami Ganjavi (1141–1209), artist Navid Sinaki has created The Infinite Garden, a queer epic about a king who builds a garden for each of his three lovers; one of flowers, one of fruit, and another of glass.

Past exhibition

Lauren Hana Chai: The Five Senses

Known for contrasting her traditional Korean upbringing with modern American life, Hawai‘i-based painter and ceramicist Lauren Hana Chai (b. 1991) includes a personal story or cultural narrative within each work of art. 

Past exhibition

Transformation: Modern Japanese Art

Inspired by a recent gift of more than 126 artworks by noted collector Terry Welch, this exhibition explores the dynamic modern period (1860s–1930s) in Japanese art, when dramatic changes in society were reflected in the arts, resulting in works of stunning vision and technical accomplishment.

Past exhibition

Salman Toor: No Ordinary Love

No Ordinary Love is Salman Toor’s (b. 1983, Pakistan) first museum exhibition in the Pacific region. The show features approximately 40 recent paintings and works on paper in the artist’s unique style of contemporary genre painting.

Past exhibition

Moemoeā

Through fantasy and found materials, Maui-based Noah Harders’ first museum exhibition invites viewers to peer into another world.

Past exhibition

Navigating a Minefield: A Manga Depiction of Japanese Americans in the Second World War

Navigating a Minefield is the first manga exhibition at HoMA to address the internationalization of manga and its connection to Japan’s cultural diaspora—in this case, its usage by a Japanese American author to discuss the history of Hawaiʻi’s nisei community.

Past exhibition

Rebecca Louise Law: Awakening

Hawai‘i’s deep connection to pua—both endemic and imported flowers—was celebrated in a year-long art installation that transformed two museum galleries into immersive floral experiences.

Past exhibition

Cross Pollination: Flowers Across the Collection

Presented in conjunction with the immersive anchor installation Rebecca Louise Law: Awakening (Galleries 12 and 13), this exhibition unites a wonderfully diverse arrangement of floral artworks from HoMA’s permanent collection.

Past exhibition