The Honolulu Museum of Art (formerly the Honolulu Academy of Arts) is an art museum in Honolulu, Hawaii. The museum is the largest of its kind in the state, and was founded in 1922 by Anna Rice Cooke. It has one of the largest collections of Asian and Pan-Pacific art in the United States, and since its official opening on April 8, 1927, its collections have grown to more than 55,000 works of art.Ellis, George R., "Statement by George R. Ellis", Orientations, Dec. 1999, p. 30
Description J. Carter Brown, director of the National Gallery of Art from 1969 to 1992, called the Honolulu Museum of Art "the finest small museum in the United States".Sigall, Bob, Several Pieces at Art Museum Have Fascinating Backgrounds, Honolulu Star Advertiser, June 7, 2013, p. B3. In addition to an internationally renowned permanent collection, the museum houses innovative exhibitions, an art school, an independent art house theatre, a café, and a museum shop. In 2011, The Contemporary Museum gave its assets and collection to the Honolulu Academy of Arts; in 2012, the combined museum changed its name to the Honolulu Museum of Art.
The museum is accredited by the American Alliance of Museums and is registered as a National and State Historical site. In 1990, the Honolulu Museum of Art School opened to expand the program of studio art classes and workshops. In 2001, the Henry R. Luce Pavilion Complex opened with the Honolulu Museum of Art Café, Museum Shop, and Henry R. Luce Wing, with of gallery space.
Collections and holdings
The Honolulu Museum of Art has a large collection of Asian art, especially Japanese and Chinese works. The Asian art collection includes more than 20,000 works of art, with galleries dedicated to Japan, China, Korea, India, Southeast Asia, Indonesia, and the Philippines. The collection is especially strong in Chinese and Japanese paintings, Korean ceramics, Buddhist and Shinto sculpture, South and Southeast Asian sculpture and decorative arts, and textiles from across Asia. The crown jewel of the Asian art collection is the James A. Michener Collection of more than 10,000 Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints, the third-largest collection of its kind in the United States.
Major collections include the Samuel H. Kress collection of Italian Renaissance paintings, American and European paintings and decorative arts, art of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas, textiles, contemporary art, and a graphics collection of over 23,000 works on paper. The museum's European and American collection of paintings, sculptures, decorative arts, textiles, and more than 15,000 works on paper range from the Renaissance to the present. Highlights are major Impressionist, Post-Impressionist and early modernist paintings by Georges Braque, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, Fernand Léger, Henri Matisse, Amedeo Modigliani, Claude Monet, Pablo Picasso, and James McNeill Whistler. Significant works of art since the 20th century include paintings and sculptures by Lee Bontecou, Alexander Calder, Leon Golub, Philip Guston, Yan Pei Ming, Isamu Noguchi, Nam June Paik, John Singer Sargent, and David Smith.
The Department of European and American Art has paintings by Josef Albers, Francis Bacon, Edward Mitchell Bannister, Romare Bearden, Jean-Baptiste Belin, Bernardino di Betti (called Pinturicchio), Abraham van Beyeren, Albert Bierstadt, Carlo Bonavia, Pierre Bonnard, François Boucher, Aelbrecht Bouts, Mary Cassatt, Paul Cézanne, Giorgio de Chirico, Frederic Edwin Church, Jacopo di Cione, Edwaert Colyer, John Singleton Copley, Piero di Cosimo, Gustave Courbet, Carlo Crivelli, Jasper Francis Cropsey, Henri-Edmond Cross, Stuart Davis, Edgar Degas, Eugène Delacroix, Robert Delaunay, Richard Diebenkorn, Arthur Dove, Thomas Eakins, Henri Fantin-Latour, Helen Frankenthaler, Bartolo di Fredi, Jan van Goyen, Francesco Granacci, Childe Hassam, Hans Hofmann, Pieter de Hooch, Adélaïde Labille-Guiard, Philip Guston, William Harnett, George Inness, Alex Katz, Paul Klee, Nicolas de Largillière, Sir Thomas Lawrence, Morris Louis, Maximilien Luce, Alessandro Magnasco, Robert Mangold, the Master of 1518, Pierre Mignard, Claude Monet, Thomas Moran, Giovanni Battista Moroni, Grandma Moses, Robert Motherwell, Alice Neel, Kenneth Noland, Georgia O'Keeffe, Amédée Ozenfant, Charles Willson Peale, James Peale, Camille Pissarro, Fairfield Porter, Robert Priseman, Robert Rauschenberg, Odilon Redon, Diego Rivera, George Romney, Francesco de' Rossi (called Il Salviati), Carlo Saraceni, Gino Severini, Frank Stella, Gilbert Stuart, Thomas Sully, Yves Tanguy, Jan Philips van Thielen, Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo, Bartolomeo Vivarini, Maurice de Vlaminck, and William Guy Wall.
The collection also includes three-dimensional works by Alexander Archipenko, Robert Arneson, Leonard Baskin, Lee Bontecou, Émile Antoine Bourdelle, Nick Cave, Dale Chihuly, John Talbott Donoghue, Jacob Epstein, David Hockney, Donald Judd, Jun Kaneko, Gaston Lachaise, Wilhelm Lehmbruck, Roy Lichtenstein, Jacques Lipschitz, Aristide Maillol, John McCracken, Claude Michel (called Clodion), Henry Moore, Elie Nadelman, George Nakashima, Louise Nevelson, Hiram Powers, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, George Rickey, Auguste Rodin, James Rosati, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Lucas Samaras, George Segal, Mark di Suvero, Tom Wesselmann, and Jack Zajac.Ellis, George R., Honolulu Academy of Arts, Selected Works, Honolulu, Honolulu Academy of Arts, 1990Ellis, George R. and Marcia Morse, A Hawaii Treasury, Masterpieces from the Honolulu Academy of Arts, Tokyo, Asahi Shimbun, 2000 The permanent collection is presented in 32 galleries and six courtyards.
The museum also carries works by Volcano School painter Charles Furneaux.
The museum traces the history of art in Hawaiʻi, with a gallery dedicated to Hawaiian traditional arts, art by Hawaiʻi artists, and art of Hawaiʻi.
The permanent collection is presented in 32 galleries and six courtyards.
Admission The Honolulu Museum of Art occupies near downtown Honolulu. It is open to the public Wednesday through Sunday. Admission is free to members, children 18 and under, and for some events; otherwise a fee is charged. Complimentary admission is offered to Hawaiʻi residents on the third Sunday of the month from 10AM until 6PM. Guided tours are offered several times daily.
Hours The museum is open Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday 10AM-6PM, and Friday 10AM-9PM. It is closed Monday and Tuesday.[HoMA: Plan Your Visit: https://honolulumuseum.org/plan-your-visit/]
Doris Duke Theatre The Doris Duke Theatre at the museum seats 280. It hosts movies, concerts, lectures, and presentations.
Robert Allerton Art Library In 1927, the Research Library opened with 500 books. In 1955, it was expanded and named for Robert Allerton. The collection includes 45,000 books and periodicals, biographical files on artists, and auction catalogues dating to the beginning of the 20th century. The library is a non-circulating research facility with a reading room open to the public.
Honolulu Museum of Art School
Education has been at the core of the Honolulu Museum of Art's mission since it opened. The museum serves more than 40,000 children and adults annually through free school tours, classes and workshops, outreach programs, activity-filled free museum days, free lectures, and other special programming.
The Honolulu Museum of Art School (formerly the Academy Art Center at Linekona) opened in 1990 and serves thousands of children and adults each year.
Shangri La: Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art
Shangri La is a museum for learning about the global culture of Islamic art and design through innovative exhibitions, educational initiatives, public programs, and community partnerships. Through a partnership with the Honolulu Museum of Art (HoMA), visitors may tour Shangri La. Reservations are required.
Doris Duke built Shangri La with the help of American architect Marion Sims Wyeth. Duke's collection of Islamic art was assembled over 60 years.
History Anna Rice Cooke, a daughter of New England missionaries and the Honolulu Museum of Art's founder, said in her dedication statement at the museum's opening on April 8, 1927: That our children of many nationalities and races, born far from the centers of art, may receive an intimation of their own cultural legacy and wake to the ideals embodied in the arts of their neighbors ... that Hawaiians, Americans, Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Filipinos, Northern Europeans and all other people living here, contacting through the channel of art those deep intuitions common to all, may perceive a foundation on which a new culture enriched by the old strains may be built in the islands.Ellis, George R., Honolulu Academy of Arts, Selected Works, Honolulu, Honolulu Academy of Arts, 1990, p.10Born on Oahu in 1853, Cooke grew up on Kauai island in a home that appreciated the arts. In 1874, she married Charles Montague Cooke, and the two eventually settled in Honolulu. In 1882, they built a home on Beretania Street, across from Thomas Square. As Cooke's career prospered, they gathered their private art collection. First were "parlor pieces" for their home. She frequented the shop of furniture maker Yeun Kwock Fong Inn, who often had ceramics and textile pieces sent from his brother in China.
The Cookes' art collection outgrew their home and the homes of their children. In 1920, she and her daughter Alice (Mrs. Phillip Spalding), her daughter-in-law Dagmar (Mrs. Richard Cooke), and Catharine E. B. Cox (Mrs. Isaac Cox), an art and drama teacher, began to catalogue and research the collection with the intent to display the items in a museum. With little formal training, these women obtained a charter for the museum from the Territory of Hawaii in 1922 while continuing to catalogue the collection. Cooke wanted a museum that reflected Hawaii's multicultural makeup. Not bound by the traditional Western idea of art museums, she also wanted to showcase the island's climate in an open and airy environment, using courtyards that interconnect the galleries.
The Cookes donated their Beretania Street land along with an endowment of $25,000. Their home was torn down to make way for the museum. New York architect Bertram Goodhue designed a classic Hawaiian-style building with simple off-white exteriors and tiled roofs. He died before the project was completed; it was finished by Hardie Phillip. This style has been imitated in many buildings throughout the state.
On April 8, 1927, the Honolulu Museum of Art opened. There was a traditional Hawaiian blessing and the Royal Hawaiian Band, under the direction of Henri Berger, performed. With the opening of the museum came gifts of many pieces, sometimes even entire collections. Additions to the original building include a library (1956), an education wing (1960), a gift shop (1965), a cafe (1969), a contemporary gallery, administrative offices, a 292-seat theater (1977), and an art center for studio classes and expanded educational programming (1989). In 1999, the museum created a children's interactive gallery, lecture hall, and offices.
The original building was named Hawaii's best building by the Hawaii Chapter of the American Institute of Architecture and is registered as a National and State Historical site. The museum is accredited by the American Alliance of Museums.
In 1998, extensive renovation began, starting with the Asian wing. In September 1999, construction began on the John Hara-designed Henry R. Luce Pavilion Complex, which opened on May 13, 2001. It includes expanded spaces for The Pavilion Café and The Museum Shop and a new two-story exhibition structure. The Luce Complex is named for Henry R. Luce, the co-founder and editor of Time magazine and other publications. His widow, Clare Boothe Luce, had a residence in Hawaii and served on the museum's board of trustees from 1972 to 1977.