A Tribute In Honor of Bernice Akamine: KALO

Sunday, September 15, 2024
Time: 11 a.m. to 12 p.m.
Location: J.M. Long Gallery
Free with Museum Admission

On the closing day of the Corned Beef & Kalo exhibition, join us in Hawaiian Hall as we gather, reflect, and pay tribute to artist Bernice Akamine (December 1, 1949 – June 14, 2024).

On Sunday, September 15 at 11 a.m., as we gather around KALO featured in the J.M. Long gallery, Healoha Johnston, Curator of Corned Beef & Kalo and Director of Cultural Resources at Bishop Museum, will guide a conversation alongside Kaʻiulani Akamine to honor Bernice Akamine’s life and legacy using her KALO piece as an anchor for inspiration. Guests will be invited to share reflections on Bernice Akamine’s life and work in a moderated talk-story format.
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“With art, you have the opportunity to change many minds…”¹

–Bernice Akamine, 2023

Bishop Museum honors the life of Bernice Akamine and celebrates the artwork she created. Though we mourn her recent passing, the Museum finds solace in knowing the impact of her work will continue to be felt. Akamine’s mixed-media artworks are indicative of her wide-ranging aesthetic influences and sensitive social awareness. A BFA and MFA in glass, both earned at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, were a continuation of her art education rather than the beginning. Plants grown in family gardens, urban experiences, underwater ecosystems, social justice movements, Hawaiian material culture, along with museum collections located around the world, informed her practice. Bernice’s sketchbooks, which she maintained over the course of decades, are rich with notes and images documenting her interpretation of environments, political concerns, and the materials she activated.

As an artist, Bernice was committed to increasing the visibility of issues significant to the Native Hawaiian community, and through her work invited allyship and collaboration in political imperatives. “I want to counter the notion I sometimes hear expressed by some that ʻmy voice does not count.’ I hope that as people look at all the names represented on the [KALO] plants that they will feel the same pride I see and hear each time someone tells me they found the name of an ancestor of theirs on the petition protesting annexation. Every voice matters. And when those voices come together, they become powerful and sustaining.”²

Bernice is recognized as a dye and kapa maker, and an avid researcher whose contributions to Hawaiʻi’s contemporary art history are significant. Her work has been featured in gallery and museum exhibitions in and outside of Hawaiʻi. One of her KALO plants is in Bishop Museum’s permanent collection, and has been an anchor piece in the exhibitions Regenerations (2021) and Corned Beef & Kalo (2024) in Bishop Museum’s J. M. Long Gallery. It is incredibly humbling to have worked with Bernice over the past year in preparation for Corned Beef & Kalo. As the Museum and community members plan how to commemorate her, having her KALO on view in 2024 has offered visitors the opportunity to remember the artist, and find small yet meaningful ways to acknowledge her bold spirit, tireless work ethic, and brilliant creativity.

Written by Healoha Johnston, Director of Cultural Resources, and Curator for Hawaiʻi and Pacific Arts and Culture at Bishop Museum

Footnotes

¹ Heather Haunani Giugni, Artists of Hawaiʻi, 2023. Honolulu, Hawaiʻi: State Foundation on Culture and the Arts

² Dawn Morias, “NACF Fellow Recreates Anti-annexation Petition in KALO,” HUFFPOST, August 19, 2015, updated December 6, 2017 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/nacf-fellow-bernice-akami_b_7821938