Marcia Morse: HoMA is a second home

When you take a tour with docent Marcia Morse, you are learning from someone with an MFA in printmaking from Stanford (not to mention a BA with honors in social sciences from Harvard and a PhD in political science from the University of Hawai‘i). You are also getting someone who knows the museum intimately.

“It has been like a second home,” says Morse of the Honolulu Museum of Art. “I took classes as a child. My mother played Christmas music on a harpsichord for children here every holiday.”

She has seen all the changes. “It’s interesting to think of how the space has changed functionally over the years. There was a print studio where Asian Art [curatorial office] is now. What’s now the Islamic Gallery was dedicated to prints from the collection. Things change as the institution has evolved.”

An accomplished artist, Morse has exhibited widely in Hawai‘i and is preparing for a retrospective exhibition at the Maui Arts & Cultural Center in November. As an educator, she taught studio art, art history, and women’s studies for more than 30 years at Honolulu Community College. She is also an engaging art critic, having covered exhibitions in the Sunday Advertiser/Star Bulletin and Honolulu Weekly, always with an eye to fostering the arts community. She has written essays for the exhibition catalogues on such artists as Satoru Abe, Tadashi Sato, and Claude Horan. At the museum she curated and wrote the catalogues for Legacy: Facets of Island Modernism (2001) and Inner World, Outer World: The Art of Keichiand Sueko Kimura (2001). In 2016, she contributed to the catalogue for Harry Tsuchidana: A Retrospective.

While Morse earned her undergraduate degree in social sciences, she used it to frame her longstanding interest in art and art history. Following college, she lived in Ecuador for two life- and art-altering years. “I returned with two essential insights,” says Morse. “I had my first encounter with printmaking—the medium that would become a lifelong passion, and I experienced something of which I had been unaware as a child, namely the legacy of colonialism and its impact on indigenous culture.”

Twice a week you can find Morse in the print vault, where she volunteers helping rehouse the collection with archival materials. “The mats, interleaving…many are from almost a hundred years ago. It’s good to give new, healthier homes to these lovely works.”

As much as she gives to the museum, she feels she receives much in return. “I have had the museum in my estate plan for decades—I added it as soon as I knew I was going to have something to leave behind,” says Morse, who recently also made a gift in memory of her fellow volunteer Steven McClaren. “There’s a sense of reciprocity, thinking of all the things I’ve benefited from in association with the museum. It’s worth giving back to the institution that has nurtured me in so many ways and continues to give me pleasure.”

Posted by Lesa Griffith on June 27 2023