Native Hawaiian and former Oregonian Lehuauakea has created 10 kapa paintings and digital art posters that will be on display this weekend at the Patricia Reser Center for the Arts in Beaverton. Kapa is a textile made from the bark of certain trees after going through a process involving soaking and beating to create the fabric. Lehuauakea’s work for this exhibit focuses on belonging, especially at a time where there are more Native Hawaiians living on the U.S. mainland than in Hawaii. Lehuauakea joins us to share more about their art and the upcoming exhibit.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. The Native Hawaiian and former Oregonian artist, Lehuauakea, has created 10 kapa paintings and digital art posters that are going to be on display this weekend at the Patricia Reser Center for the Arts in Beaverton. Kapa is a textile made from the bark of certain trees. Lehuauakea’s work for this exhibit focuses on belonging. It comes at a time when there are more Native Hawaiians living on the U.S. mainland than in Hawaii. Lehuauakea joins us now. It’s great to have you on the show.
Lehuauakea: Thank you. It’s great to be here.
Miller: You work in a number of different mediums including kapa. What is kapa?
Lehuauakea: Kapa, or Tapa as you might know it, it’s a traditional non-woven textile made from the beaten bark of certain trees. The tree that I usually work with is paper mulberry and it’s really a practice, a customary tradition that goes back hundreds and even thousands of years, used throughout not only parts of the Pacific, but also certain parts of Asia, Indonesia, even certain parts of South America and Africa. So it’s really widespread, but the beautiful thing is that it’s so unique to each place and community that makes it, that it’s a form of storytelling all its own.
Miller: What’s the process of making it like? I mean, from the gathering of materials to the crafting of this barkcloth itself?
Lehuauakea: Yeah. I mean, that’s kind of a loaded question, right? It’s so many different steps involved, from harvesting the material. But even before that, you have to make sure that the trees that you’re harvesting from are tended to a certain way and cared for from the time that they create their offshoots until the time that you harvest. So long story short, it’s stripped off in a single piece. The bark is pulled from the inner woody center and depending on which tradition you’re making or you’re pulling from, it goes through a series of processes that involve fermentation, soaking, pounding, watermarking. And then once you have your finished cloth, then you can do your painting with natural pigments or dyes, and things like that. So, there’s a lot that goes into it.
Miller: How did you get started with this particular practice?
Lehuauakea: So around the time that I was finishing my BFA at PNCA in Portland, I really realized that there was something missing within my work. I felt like my work wasn’t culturally grounded in my own heritage, my own background, my own identity. So I started bringing some of the traditional patterns that we use as elements of storytelling and symbolism on kapa. And soon after I realized that I needed to find a teacher to teach me how to make the material itself. As luck would have it, my grandmother ran into the same individual that she used to babysit like 60 years prior, and he’s a master practitioner back home in Hawaii now. His name is Wesley Sen and he took me on as a student. So it’s kind of beautiful that even though we’re not related by blood, the knowledge gets to still remain in our family in a way.
Miller: In your bio, you don’t just give an acknowledgement to your teacher, Wesley Sen, but to six of his teachers by name. What does it mean to you to be in this multigenerational line of artists or creators?
Lehuauakea: It’s huge because acknowledging our teachers is part of the story. It’s not just like I mentioned relations by blood. It’s also our genealogy of knowledge, and how that knowledge has been cared for and stewarded up until the point where we become a steward. And for us as Hawaiians, it’s really special because this practice was something that I didn’t learn from my parents or my grandparents or even my great grandparents. It’s something that, starting in the mid 1800s, started to quickly disappear. And by the early 1900s, there was really no one who was doing it on a regular basis. And that’s a huge statement because we think about how in precontact Hawaii, almost every family had kapa makers. It was because it was such an important part of everyday life, from clothing to bedding to funerary rights. Even some medicinal uses as well. So you couldn’t not know how to work with the material.
So to be able to acknowledge my teachers who have passed it down to me so that I can, at some point, pass it to my future generations and keep this knowledge going, that’s a huge responsibility, but it’s also a blessing in order to even have that knowledge to carry.
Miller: You pointed out in a podcast you did for the Smithsonian that in many Indigenous languages, including the Native Hawaiian language, the concept of “art” didn’t exist. So there was no direct translation for that English word. Does that affect the way you think about the work you’re doing or your identity as, what we say in English, an artist?
Lehuauakea: Definitely, because I feel like with my work, my creative practice, I kind of straddle the line or maybe blur the line between cultural practitioner and contemporary artist. But the reality is that I wouldn’t be able to be the contemporary artist that I am now if I didn’t have the foundation of traditional knowledge that has been passed to me. So I look at my work, I think, in a different light. I see the more traditional uses of kapa as just as important as things that I do within gallery spaces or museums. And a lot of times there are blurring of those two things and there’s a lot of crossover between those kinds of spaces. But I think it carries different weight for me because I don’t just get to … when I see my work, I don’t just see myself represented. I see my entire community and those who came before me as well. So I feel like there’s a lot of eyes making sure that I do things right, and that I continue sharing this knowledge in a good way.
Miller: You’ve been partnering with the community leader and Hula teacher Leialoha for the show at the Reser this weekend. What did it mean to you to find her and her school, I don’t know, five or six years ago, when you were living and studying in Oregon?
Lehuauakea: Yeah, I found Lei and her halau, Ka Lei Haliʻa O Ka Lokelani, at the end of 2018, right after I graduated from PNCA. And coming off of an academic journey where I realized that my culture was just as important, if not more so, than any degree that I could obtain, and kind of reconnecting to what I had grown up around, thinking that I really took it for granted when I was a kid. And I found the halau when I must have been like 22, 23. It was amazing. I felt like I was coming home to myself again. I had started going by my Hawaiian name again. I just found my kapa teacher, Wesley Sen and then I found her in the halau and the whole community that came with it. And it was really beautiful.
I heard her speaking our language, I heard our traditional chants and mele, and it even made it more telling that she has really, really strong roots on my home island. And that just felt like the icing on the cake. That was confirmation for me that that’s where I needed to be at the time. And they’ve continued to be supportive, and it’s really been a mutual support system that goes on between myself and the community out there, because that’s really what it’s about.
Miller: Lehuauakea, thanks so much for joining us.
Lehuauakea: Thank you.
Miller: You can see Lehuauakea’s work this weekend at the Patricia Reser Center for the Arts in Beaverton.
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