Pacific Arts: The Journal of the Pacific Arts Association

Pacific Arts Vol. 23 No. 2 (2023-24) Cover & Table of Contents

Pacific Arts N.S. Vol. 24, No. 1 (2024) Full Issue

Roger Boulay (1943–2024) devoted the majority of his professional life to building an inventory of Kanak material culture from New Caledonia. In 1979, Jean-Marie Tjibaou had passed the idea for this project on to Boulay, who immediately set to work in New Caledonia and in European museums. In 1982, he became a part-time curator at the National Museum of the Arts of Africa and Oceania in Paris, and began reorganizing that museum collection and its displays. In subsequent years he created or co-commissioned an amazing variety of exhibitions, in Paris, Nouméa, and elsewhere. He often looked at objects from unexpected angles, preferring the critical eye of the craftsman he had been. From 1993 to 1998, Boulay worked in Nouméa as a member of the team that was key to bringing the Centre Culturel Tjibaou to functioning. Roger Boulay passed away on July 2, 2024.

The Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection of the University of Virginia is the only museum outside of Australia dedicated to the exhibition and study of Indigenous Australian arts and cultures. From 2019 to 2021, Kluge-Ruhe partnered with the Return of Cultural Heritage program of the Australian Institute for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies to facilitate the return of cultural heritage items to Arrernte, Warlpiri, and Warumungu communities in Australia. Through such collaborative partnership with larger organizations, small museums like Kluge-Ruhe can plan, document, and implement large-scale, long-range projects like unconditional repatriation to Indigenous Australian communities. Such endeavors also help prepare smaller institutions for future projects, including internal policy writing and continued community engagement.

This essay brings together creative practice and pedagogy centered on the Marshall Islands to examine how poetry and politics, used together as a critical call-and-response strategy, can contribute to the achievement of climate and nuclear justice for that country. The first part of the essay discusses my work-in-progress documentary film, Her Excellency, which focuses on the stories of women who are heads of state—in particular, the women I met and interviewed in the Marshall Islands in August 2018. The second part describes how I incorporated the film’s stories from the Marshall Islands into an ecomedia film course I taught in spring 2022. While the COVID-19 pandemic temporarily halted the film’s production, I continued my creative practice and research in the remote-learning classroom, where I established a spirit of co-inspiration with my ecomedia students. In the first half of a semester focused on the Marshall Islands, students critically and creatively considered what steps we can take to mobilize our support for the Marshallese people and for ourselves in the face of rising sea levels. Through their ecomedia projects on the Marshall Islands the students steered their audiences to navigate our entangled and problematic world, visualize our place in this world, understand the importance of feeling with islanders, and situate our lives in relation to the Marshallese. These connective relations matter to our mutual survival and mutual healing from the brutal acts of history so that we may forge paths toward livable presents and futures for all.

This article analyzes three portrait photographs from the 1850s that visually emphasize the importance of kinship and genealogy for the aliʻi (chiefly class) , through their representation of two high-ranking women: Queen Kalama and Princess Victoria Kamāmalu. It argues that during this period, portrait photographs became a new way of displaying and manifesting meaningful matrilineal connections that had political consequences for elite Hawaiians, particularly the connection between aliʻi wahine (chiefly women) and political power in Hawaiʻi. This research indicates that aliʻi engagement with photography, rather than merely copying Euro-American visual forms, used Hawaiian ontologies and epistemologies as its crucial starting points.

On February 16, 2024, the North American chapter of the Pacific Arts Association hosted a panel at the 112th College Art Association (CAA) Annual Conference in Chicago. Chaired by Sylvia Cockburn (Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow) and Maggie Wander (senior research associate) from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, this roundtable invited Halena Kapuni-Reynolds, associate curator of Native Hawaiian history and culture at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI), and Ingrid Ahlgren, curator for Oceanic collections at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University, to share updates on their current projects and discuss critical issues in Oceanic art curation. The discussion centered on community engagement and critical methodologies grounded in Pacific epistemologies, the ethical and sociopolitical issues around museum collection and display, how to engage with different audiences (especially in the settler colonial context of North America), and how to collaborate across institutions.

Artist Kaili Chun discusses her sculptural installation Muliwai (2022), located in Waikīkī Market, Honolulu, Oʻahu, Hawaiʻi. A muliwai is an estuary formed at the intersection where the wai (fresh water of the mountains) meets the kai (salt water of the sea). Chun reflects on the importance of the muliwai ecosystem that sustains plant, animal, and human life; how urban development has impacted this rich environment; and the need for people to recognize the interconnectedness of all things and their responsibility of environmental stewardship. The site-specific sculpture connects viewers to the memory of this place in Waikīkī and invites us to reflect on our relationship with nature and appreciate the delicate balance that sustains life.

This essay is a reflection on the five-year research project “Pacific Presences: Oceanic Art and European Museums,” which was supported by the European Research Council from 2013 to 2018. It highlights the very rich and still largely under-researched potential of Oceanic collections across smaller and larger European museums, as well as the benefits of collaborative, collections-based research for communities and source nations across the Pacific.

The Healer’s Wound is an exhibition of new work by Dan Taulapapa McMullin curated by Mariquita (“Micki”) Davis and held at Pilele Projects in Los Angeles, California, June 29–July 27, 2024. The exhibition coincided with the publication of the second edition of Taulapapa's artist's book, The Healer’s Wound: A Queer Theirstory of Polynesia, edited by Marika Emi and curated by Drew Kahuʻāina Broderick (Honolulu: Tropic Editions and Puʻuhonua Society, 2024).

Exhibition Review: Project Banaba, curated by Katerina Teaiwa, Yuki Kihara, Joy Enomoto, Healoha Johnston, and Pūlama Lima. Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum, Kaiwiʻula, Oʻahu, Hawaiʻi, November 4, 2023–February 18, 2024.

Book series review: Nicholas Thomas, general editor, Pacific Presences, 9 volumes, Leiden: Sidestone Press, 2018–2021.

Calls for participation, conferences, exhibitions, new publications, position announcements, PAA membership