The Honolulu Museum of Art was an unexpected gem
2022/01/19 WED. 2029HRS
Vancouver, British Columbia
The Honolulu Museum of Art (HoMA) was an unexpected gem. It hadn’t been in any of the travel guides we came across. The only reason why we went was because I, by chance, saw its Google Maps icon pop up near Iolani Palace, and the museum café seemed like a promising little place to get dinner. I had expected us to spend maybe a couple of hours inside. We stayed until closing and oh how I didn’t want to leave!
Of all the art galleries and museums I’ve been to, I think HoMA is my favourite. I’ve visited the Louvre and Versailles and the Hermitage and the British Museum; of course HoMA does not have the same grandeur or eminence. Instead, its small rooms and low ceilings create a gentle cocoon of a space that is neither belittling nor dismissive. The entire architecture of the building — the courtyard and the interior, each nook and each display — seemed to be built with thoughtful purpose to house that specific piece of art or artefact. Every piece of work was well-loved, curated rather than pillaged.
The museum was perfectly sized, small enough to manage a survey of every single display in one visit, but big enough that there would always be more to discover for the returning visitor. The content of the galleries reach almost every corner of the world, from Oceania to the Americas to Europe to Africa and to Asia. The displays range from purely functional artefacts to aesthetic utensils, religious mementos, sculpture, calligraphy, sketch, painting, and digital/multi-media compositions.
Upon entry into the museum, our first encounter was a commendable collection of European paintings featuring names that even I in my ignorance recognised: a Picasso, a Monet, and a Cézanne; a sketch by Degas and several paintings by Matisse. A little further ahead: a row of Georgia O’Keefe — whom we recently learned about from our artistically inclined neighbour — whose paintings are simple and clean and subtly sensual.
Dinner was Herb-grilled Chicken Breast Sandwich and HoMA Cheeseburger at the café. It was fresh and delicious, and quite possibly the most reasonably priced restaurant meal we had in Honolulu. We had the good fortune of visiting in an evening when local high school students were playing casual concerts in the courtyards. In the café was a pianist; he brought a keyboard which he laid across the arms of two dining chairs. He himself sat in a fold-up chair and commanded a plastic foot pedal.
I’m not sure what pieces he played, but he was excellent in both technique and interpretation. The choice of repertoire was perhaps a little too flashy for ambiance music in a café, but that could be on account of his youth. The particular combination of the tackiness in his setup and the talent that flowed from his fingers was amusing and nostalgic.
A few tunes later, a violinist joined him and played a solo or two. She was competent but had not quite mastered her instrument as he had. When she finished and he began playing again, he sounded a lot less rehearsed, the music filled with hesitancies. I’d been confused until I noticed him humming to himself, or rather him humming to her; it was a duet they’d never practiced before but he wanted her to try, so he was giving her a quick run-down, playing his part while humming hers. When he finished, the violinist seemed unconvinced and a little embarrassed. He egged her on, gently encouraging, voice light and lips in a smile, filled with simple faith in the kindness of strangers — that our audience of four diners and one waitress would still show unreserved appreciation despite the piece being unpracticed and inevitably filled with mistakes and false starts.
She eventually relented, and he guided her through the piece. It was imperfect but fun, filled with both the bashfulness and boldness of youth. Watching the boy, I knew that, if he chose to, he would make an excellent musician one day, and I, too, had a simple faith in the beauty of his character.
Near the end of our visit, we saw a temporary exhibit by contemporary artists. Each piece was an overt social commentary — on the housing crisis, indigenous relations, protests and policing — that, to me, was able to manifest its full impact precisely because it was prefaced by those paintings from bygone days — aesthetic pieces that display beauty for the sake of beauty.
The exhibit was split into two rooms. In the far-right corner of the first room, there was a cylindrical enclosure about the diameter two arm-spans. It glowed from the inside; the entrance was a narrow rectangular doorway veiled by a piece of fabric.
The not-quite-room was painted red in its interior and covered from floor to ceiling in small sculpted flowers. The only empty space was on the floor— a circle framed by soft yellow candles that pulled me to sit, legs folded together and swept to one side. The space was intimate, warm and safe as a womb, and pulled my spine and the arch of my neck into a womanly grace I rarely display.
Outside the room, there was a tall black wall serving as a divider. On the other side of the wall was an attached half-table with what looked like a guestbook laid on top. I flipped though it. There were generic messages from visitors and drawings by children who’d tagged along. I flipped some more and saw short notes and long paragraphs — about abuse and rape, about aches from decades ago and hurts caused yester-day. I looked up in a daze and finally took a moment to read the artist’s statement, something about pain and healing and those experiences that are tragically and uniquely feminine. I think, perhaps, the fact that I had sensed nothing but beauty in that room spoke loudly of my naivety and good fortune. Or, perhaps, such is the nature of art.
Looking back at the guestbook, I felt a distinct sense of shame and wrongdoing that I had laid eyes on such secrets; the disconcerting effect of the experience was amplified by stick figures and houses and trees drawn by children in the very same book. It is like this, though, in real life, isn’t it? Violence and pain only a paper-thin edge from blissful innocence, and the non-sensical yet unavoidable conflict between justice and privacy fully at the mercy of the common decency of the unwitting passerby.
