Pacific Arts: The Journal of the Pacific Arts Association

Pacific Arts Vol. 26 No. 1 (2026) Cover, Journal Information, and Table of Contents

Pacific Arts N.S. Vol. 26, No. 1 (2026) Full Issue

On June 15, 2024, during the 13th Festival of Pacific Arts and Culture (FestPAC), the Bishop Museum held a ceremony honoring the latte—ancient Chamorro megalithic stone house pillars—that the museum stewards. Unlawfully removed from the Mariana Islands in the 1920s, these latte, along with over 10,000 artifacts, had been recently relocated to the Bishop Museum’s central courtyard by Hawaiian Chamorro diaspora members. The 2024 ceremony, attended by members of the Chamorro diaspora from the US and FestPAC delegates from Guåhan (Guam) and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, was the culmination of the reconditioning, relocation, and re-display of the ancestral latte, which took months of work. This paper, presented at the 2024 Pacific Arts Association-Europe conference in Berlin, focuses on the emotional connections that the latte ceremony elicited among three groups present: between Chamorros who attended, between Chamorros and the latte, and between Chamorros and their ancestors. Using interviews and photographs taken during the ceremony, the author emphasizes the importance of emotional responses in the processes of healing and of cultural revitalization in museum settings. More specifically, she argues that the latte were imbued with life again through chant, touch, and offerings, as the ceremony’s Chamorro attendants connected with one another and reconnected with their saina (ancestors).

This article is a reprint of a curatorial essay written for the catalogue of Transformative Currents: Art and Action in the Pacific Ocean, a multi-venue exhibition presented as part of Art & Science Collide, Getty’s most recent PST ART initiative (2024–25). Transformative Currents featured work by twenty-one artists and collaborative teams from across the Pacific region at three venues in Southern California: Oceanside Museum of Art, Orange County Museum of Art (now UC Irvine Langson Orange County Museum of Art), and Crystal Cove Conservancy. The essay details how the show, while rooted in Southern California, attempted to suture the ways in which the Pacific has been divided by colonial and imperialist powers and, thus, is regularly presented in large-scale exhibitions. It argues that the work in Transformative Currents both disembarked from Southern California and seemingly always recalled it, the artists navigating the Pacific searching for points of solidarity, not places for subjugation.

This personal essay takes shape around short descriptions and images of recent community arts and cultural events of Hawaiʻi. Reflections by the authors bring additional layers of meaning to the text. Through the interweaving of these different elements, the essay proposes family stories of Native art, culture, education, and healing in Hawaiʻi as antidotes to art-historical canons, especially those reinforced by settler colonial museums and Westernized higher education systems in the Hawaiian Islands.

Gazellah Bruder is an artist based in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea. She presents four paintings she created while an artist-in-residence (August to October 2025) in the Leipzig International Art program at the Leipziger Baumwollspinnerei in Germany. In an artist statement, Bruder describes how her paintings are inspired by conversations surrounding complex subjects—colonization, de-colonization, identity, and restitution—and presents a critique of the devastating human impact on the earth’s oceans and ocean life. Her work calls for restitution to the oceans. Then, in an interview with art historian Stacy L. Kamehiro, Bruder discusses the four paintings and her artistic process in detail.

In this visual essay, the author documents the Kilenge Nausang masks he photographed in 1977 and 1978 during a Nausang singsing in the Kilenge village cluster of Ulumainge, Waremo, and Saumoi in West New Britain. The Kilenge people describe the Nausang as a giant of extraordinary power, a being with an essentially malevolent character who serves a corrective function. The author also presents his photo-documentation of a Nausang mask depicted on the men’s house (naulum) in Potne, New Britain, as well as the construction of the men’s house.

In this interview, Kanak musician and graffiti artist Will Nerho (WillStyle), from the Neaoua tribe in Waa Wi Luu (Houaïlou) in the A’jië-Arhö region of Kanaky/New Caledonia, discusses his creative practice and navigation of cultural politics. He calls attention to the rejection of Kanak cultural markers he has experienced in Nouméa, capital of the country, located in the South Province. He also discusses the place of local animals in his art, their connection to Kanak culture, and the ecological pedagogical practice that comes with painting animals. Nerho offers a critique of French colonial appropriation of Kanak art, objects, culture, and knowledge, and emphasizes the importance of reclamation and transmission of culture within Kanak society, notably through language. He explains the significance of the flèche faîtière (carved wooden rooftop spires on Kanak houses) and reflects on his work reformulating and redesigning those flèches faîtières scattered throughout Europe that have lost their identity.

Indigenous muralists across the Pacific have adopted urban art aesthetics as a strategic means of asserting ongoing presence, celebrating cultural traditions, and articulating visions of Indigenous futures. This research note examines two murals by Hawaiian artists Carl F.K. Pao, Cory Taum, and Solomon Enos that were included in the 2021 Bishop Museum exhibition POW! WOW! The First Decade: From Hawai‘i to the World. Through urban art’s accessible visual language, these artists assert an enduring Indigenous will to self-define, ground their work in ancestral knowledge, and articulate temporal visions that span past, present, and multiple futures.

This dialogue between Andre Perez and J. Kēhaulani Kauanui explores the recent revitalization of Hawaiian wood carving through two recent projects Perez had a leadership role in. Perez is founder and project director of Hui Kālai Kiʻi o Kūpāʻaikeʻe, a carving apprenticeship program based in Waiawa, Oʻahu, Hawai‘i. In 2025, he co-curated, with Hawaiian artist Kaili Chun, the exhibition Ho‘okāhi ka ‘Ilau Like Ana—Wield the Paddles Together at Gallery ‘Iolani at Windward Community College. For the show, Perez and Chun selected canoe paddles made in the Pacific carving village that Perez organized for the 13th Festival of Pacific Arts and Culture (FestPAC) in 2024. In the FestPAC carving village, hosted by Bishop Museum, master carvers from various Pacific nations created large wooden canoe-steering paddles (hoe uli). In this discussion, Perez and Kauanui cover a range of issues related to the traditional Hawaiian practice of carving, including the cultural politics of Indigenous revitalization.

Book review: Cassandra Coblentz, editor, Transformative Currents: Art and Action in the Pacific Ocean. X Artists’ Books and Oceanside Museum of Art, 2025. ISBN: 9798990698581. 176 pages, illustrations (chiefly color), maps. Hardcover, US$45.

Book review: Deirdre Brown and Ngarino Ellis, with Jonathan Mane-Wheoki, Toi Te Mana: An Indigenous History of Māori Art. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2025. ISBN-13: 978-0-226-83962-2, ISBN-10: 0-226-83962-1, xii+604 pages, 584 color illustrations, notes, references, index. Cloth US$55.

Book review: Carol E. Mayer, Sea of Islands: Exploring Objects, Stories, and Memories from Oceania. Vancouver: Figure 1 Publishing and Museum of Anthropology at UBC, 2025. ISBN: 978-1-77327-155-2, 240 pages, color & b/w illustrations, map, acknowledgments, notes, selected bibliography, index. Hardcover US$50.

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