Behind the scenes with “Sisters of the Brush”

Justin Sandulli ’12 spent his summer at HPA’s Isaacs Art Center, curating another groundbreaking exhibition. Sisters of the Brush, the largest survey of women artists of Hawai‘i in state history, covers more than a century of diverse responses to the places and people in the islands. The origins of this exhibit can be traced back to Sandulli’s student days at HPA, where he was mentored by art history teacher and Isaacs director Mollie Hustace, and where Sandulli first encountered Hawai‘i artist Madge Tennent. Three years ago, Sandulli mounted his first major retrospective at Isaacs entitled “Rhythm in the Round: The Modernism of Madge Tennent.” In his graduate research, Sandullicontinues to work closely with the Tennent Art Foundation Collection, which is permanently housed at the Isaacs Art Center. He hopes to someday publish an updated catalogue of works in the collection with an accompanying biography and analyses of the various periods/styles of Tennet’s work. We asked him a few questions about the latest exhibition and his ongoing studies.

 

What are your hopes for this exhibition?

 

Sisters of the Brush has been a serendipitous and joyous extension of my broader graduate studies into women’s artistic culture in 20th-century Honolulu. While the thrust of the exhibition focuses on that particular period, we at Isaacs Art Center were intent on making the points that women artists have always existed in Hawaiʻi, that their contributions were unprecedented in shaping the evolution of a major American regional period style (i.e. Hawaiian Modernism), and especially that they remain central to creative endeavor in Hawaiʻi.

 

The show centers around a group called 'The Seven.' Who were they?

 

They were a coalition of Honolulu-based women painters who first exhibited together in 1929, including the incomparable Madge Tennent. Yet the story of women artists in Hawaiʻi extends well before and beyond The Seven’s two-year existence. The exhibition includes, for example, Helen Kelley’s striking watercolors of Hawai‘i’s flora from the 1880s and selections from Mayumi Oda’s ever-expanding portfolio forged in response to the islands in their enchanting totality. Together, the artists featured in this show transformed the very concept of “island art” and have indelibly shaped the cultural landscape in Hawaiʻi.

 

Madge Tennent, as the show point outs, was founder and president of The Seven. Why was she a groundbreaking artist?

 

 

Tennent devoted the bulk of her career to depicting Hawaiian women, and she rendered them in ways that were contradictory—outright confrontational, even—to the Hawaiʻi tourism industry’s contemporaneous visualizations of Hawaiian women. Brochures depicted the Hawaiian woman as a slender, Europeanized figure clad in a coconut bra and grass skirt strumming her ukulele under a full moon on Waikiki Beach; Tennent, on the other hand, embraced and accentuated the voluptuous forms and enveloping holoku garments of the actual women she observed in Hawaiʻi.

 

Did that choice have ramifications for her?

When she began exhibiting prominently on the United States mainland and in Europe in the early 1930s, the fantasy of the “happy Hawaiian hula girl” came under much more scrutiny. From an academic perspective, Tennent’s images simply had no currency within the construction of colonial discourse, which was deliberately designed to give an “outsider” population—in this case, people of Euro-American extraction living in Hawaiʻi—a margin of comfort in a society that they had come to control through questionable means.

 

Was that response true even in Hawai‘i?

That the most vitriolic early responses to her work came from affluent Honolulu families, many of whom had benefited from various land deals and business arrangements struck before Hawaiʻi’s annexation to the United States, speaks volumes to the disruptive ripples of her work. In fact, on several occasions, Madge gleefully recounted an incident when heated discussions about the “offensive” Hawaiian figures in her paintings escalated to the point that she and her husband were thrown out of a dinner party.

 

Did other women artists continue in this vein?

While Tennent was an especially incandescent lightning rod in this respect, she was by no means the only woman artist in Hawai‘i to explore social issues in her work. Shirley Russell rendered several compelling paintings of the migrant working class population during her time in Hawaiʻi (e.g. Chinese and Filipino farmers toiling out in the fields under the hot sun or trekking home at the end of a long day), while Juliette May Fraser memorialized her collaborations with local lei-makers and net-weavers—all of them unemployed due to the strict moratorium imposed on tourism in Hawaiʻi during World War II—by designing and producing painted camouflage for the army’s artillery units on Oʻahu. I can’t think of any male artist who took similar interpretive risks at the same time.

 

What is it like pulling an exhibition like this together?

I can’t overstate how much I love curating. Plenty of art scholars I know are totally content to teach and write about items in isolation, which is, of course, a necessary and worthy vocation. For me, though, there is nothing like physically gathering art together and building out a narrative in visual space.

 

That being said, my experience has taught me one essential truth: howsoever prepared you are in advance, mounting a show is always a bit of a nightmare. Even when all of the art actually arrives in the gallery, there is a fair amount of finagling to do until you strike the correct layout.. I was working on the show remotely from London, so Mollie [Hustace] and Luana [Lincoln] were really the onsite champions of locating items, facilitating loans, cataloguing incoming works, etc. We were very fortunate to have numerous bedrock treasures in the Center’s existing collection, but a few ‘showstoppers’ came in anew about six weeks out, and that simply could not have happened without the Isaacs team’s commitment to making this show the very best it could be!

 

When we last talked, you were in London. Are you headed back there, or do you have different plans for the months ahead?

Yes, I am indeed headed back to London to dig ever deeper into my academic rabbit hole. To nobody’s surprise, my focus will remain on women artists in Hawaiʻi. I’m also returning to London as the fiancé of a British politician! So, while that development will inevitably have an impact on where and how my life/career unfolds henceforth, I think it’s more than fair to say that Hawaiʻi will always remain very close to my heart, mind, and certainly future exhibition ideas!