Lehuauakea

About Lehuauakea

Lehuauakea is a Native Hawaiian (Kanaka ʻŌiwi) interdisciplinary artist and barkcloth-maker who works with ancestral organic materials in contemporary ways to highlight narratives of Indigenous environmental stewardship, an evolving Kanaka ʻŌiwi identity, and the teachings held in cultural mythologies and cosmologies. By building a personal relationship with traditional techniques and materiality, Lehuauakea breathes new life into intergenerational processes and preserves cultural memory rooted in place-based practices. Grounded by ancestral modality while advancing the medium to unconventional, innovative, and tactile forms, including hand-stitched mixed-media textiles, large-scale installation, and paintings on kapa, Lehuauakea builds on these cultural knowledge systems, ensuring the perpetuation of these modes of Indigenous storytelling. Since 2018, Lehuauakea has apprenticed under well-known barkcloth maker Wesley Sen.

Lehuauakea’s work has been exhibited internationally and is held in prominent collections around the globe, including the National Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution National Museum of the American Indian, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Portland Art Museum, National Gallery of Victoria (Australia), Queensland Art Gallery of Modern Art (Australia), Forge Project, and Museum of International Folk Art, amongst others. The artist is currently based between Santa Fe (NM) and Pāpaʻikou (HI) after earning their Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting with a minor in Art + Ecology at Pacific Northwest College of Art.