Last week visiting artist Patrick Dougherty and his crew—Hawai‘i artist Leland Miyano, museum staff, volunteers—harvested a forest’s worth of invasive strawberry guava saplings from the periphery of Ho‘omaluhia Botanical Garden. (You can read about it.) There were delays due to crazy rain, but they hauled back their green booty all muddy and a bit bloody and bruised. Then by Thursday they started creating the sculpture.

Dougherty & Co. started off drilling a pattern of holes in the lawn. The artist worked out a plan on paper, and used an empty coffee bag as a 3D model, bending it this way and that to create shapes.

“They are modified squares,” says Dougherty, talking about the foundation saplings stuck in the ground, “like a rectangular frame.” And the structure will have a series of windows facing the street, inviting people to come and explore it, and a series of doors in the back.

“It will have a vaguely human form that has a gesture, a posture—bad posture,” chuckles Dougherty. “We’ll enliven the surface with works so it will have a vitality.” As with all his “stickwork,” Dougherty also intends to give the tower of twigs a “sense of swirling—like an eddy on the side of the road, reacting to the movement on the street.”

Right now the base is complete, and scaffolding now surrounds the budding sculpture like an exoskeleton—and while Dougherty has a form in mind, the work’s final shape is determined as the project progresses. “We only hope the materials do a certain thing, but we have to rely at times on serendipitous behavior.”

The process is a lot like painting, seeing what emerges and going with it. “We’re kind of building a canvas, then painting on it,” says Dougherty.

The tall, white-haired artist sees a volunteer placing a sapling in a red-dirt hole and calls out “Hey, you can cut that off some.” What looks like a crazy tangle of strawberry guava saplings is something very precise to Dougherty, affable, observant, and economic of word. He’s like a character in a Tom McGuane novel (though he lives in North Carolina, not Montana).

Dougherty doesn’t name his pieces until their character emerges. “Once we start seeing what it is, then people say, ‘Oh, it looks like…’ Or someone will say something clever—the title usually arrives that way,” he says. He likes a name that “characterizes it but doesn’t burden it.”

To see step-by-step progress on Dougherty’s artwork, go here. We’ll post a new image each day. Work continues through Feb. 24.

You can hear Dougherty talk about his work himself: Come see and hear his free lecture on Thursday, Feb 16 at 4pm in the Doris Duke Theatre.

The first concrete sign of Hawai‘i Art Now was Eli Baxter installing her work Ascension on the staircase leading to the Art of Hawai‘i Gallery last week. She ingeniously inserted her trademark material—recycled bicycle inner tubes— into the puka clusters in the wall. The result are these at once menacing and inviting black blooms.

Tonight at 7pm members get a first gander at this and more than 50 other works at the opening reception for Hawai‘i Art Now.

Here is Eli’s artist’s statement about her installation, which is part of her ongoing series The Garden Stories:

“Through interweaving and juxtaposing manmade recycled media and detritus with highly suggestive organic forms, I am continuing my ongoing exploration and inquiry into the relationship and interaction between human beings and the natural world. This relationship is complex and multifaceted, both positive and negative. Themes of worship and cultivation are mixed with domination and control, disintegration and destruction. The artistic process and the media used in this series, suggest additional themes of labor, transformation, and consumption. Architectural or structural elements are also key in The Garden Stories site-specific installations, further highlighting both the physical and psychological relationship between the industrial and the organic.”

It’s time to Doodle 4 Google! The theme this year is “If I could travel in time…” and we are Google’s local partner for Hawai‘i. So we’ve set up Doodle 4 Google stations at Spalding House and at our art school. The stations are created by Alban Cooper, who is the graphic designer and exhibition coordinator for the school. We’ll also have a Google 4 Doodle station set up at Bank of Hawaii Family Sunday on Feb. 19 and March 18. At each station you’ll find pens, pencils, and crayons for kids in grades K through 12.

Then you mail in your design to Google (must be postmarked by March 20). Get all the submission rules. The state finalists from Hawai‘i will have their designs displayed in an exhibition at the museum. Then the Hawai‘i winner gets a trip to New York for the final Regional Finalist event on May 17, 2012 and a t-shirt printed with their doodles on it. All 50 Regional Finalists will also have their doodle displayed in a special exhibition at the New York Public Library. The prize for the 1 National Winner? Check it out. Oh, did we mention that one of the guest judges for finals is Katy Perry? Moms, dads, grandmas, grandpas, and teachers, I’d get your kids to one of our Doodle 4 Google stations or download them an entry form pronto. (Teachers, Google will even snail mail you a packet if you need a lot of forms.)

The stripping of the strawberry guava saplings started on our front lawn today. Sherwood and Gerry Gwan, pictured here, are on vacation from the Bay Area. Gerry grew up here and the couple are visiting her mother. They stopped by the museum today, saw what was going on, and asked if they could help. Heck yeah! Thanks so much Sherwood and Gerry! They’re removing the leafy, twiggy branches so that artist Patrick Dougherty (the guy behind them) can weave them into a mammoth, sinuous sculpture. Find out more about the project. Want to assist a world-famous artist too? Call Vicki Reisner at 532-8737.

Today Patrick Dougherty started work on his installation at the museum—this meant harvesting tons of strawberry guava saplings from Ho‘omaluhia Botanical Garden. Our crew—from the installation and education departments, as well as a couple of volunteers and hired hands—thrashed around in the rain and mud for hours today hacking down the invasive species. So not only is Dougherty creating a beautiful, environmental sculpture on the museum’s front lawn, he’s also helping out the botanical garden by removing swathes of the unwanted baby trees. Win!

Then they trucked the harvest to the museum, where they just unloaded it onto the front lawn. Now Hard Work II happens, when volunteers start stripping the saplings in preparation for the sculpture.

If you’d like to help, contact Vicki Reisner at 532-8737 or vreisner@honoluluacademy.org.

Wow! Eugene Epstein, the subject of my previous post, forwarded the blog link to his nephew AJ Epstein. And he sent me this message: “I thought I should make sure you had a copy of the animation I made from photos I took during my visit to the Academy a couple years back.”

He says this animation is made from hundreds of still photos he shot of the piece over about 20 minutes. “It’s not going to flow like video, but gives more depth of the image than video would thanks to the higher resolution from the photos.”

It’s so kind and generous of him to share this with us—and now you. Intrigued by Thomas Wilfred’s lumia compositions? You can purchase videos of these extraordinary works of light at AJ’s website Clavilux.org. Proceeds are used to support the preservation of Wilfred’s lumia compositions.

Last spring, boy was I excited to get a call from a New Yorker fact checker. She wanted to know if the museum indeed owned a work by Thomas Wilfred, and was it indeed a gift from Clare Boothe Luce, and was it in storage at the Academy? Our collections manager of European and American Art, Courtney Brebbia, confirmed that, yes, we do own a “lumia composition”—what the light artist Wilfred called his works.

A few weeks later, the June 27, 2011, issue of the New Yorker included the Talk of the Town piece “Lumia” by Gregory Zinman. It talks about the cosmic flame that appears at the beginning and end of Terrence Malick’s film Tree of Life, identifying it as Wilfred’s lumia Opus 161 (1965-66). It went on to say that only 18 lumia compositions exist today, and “Clare Boothe Luce’s is in storage at the Honolulu Academy of Arts.” It also talked about lumia aficionado Eugene Epstein, who owns eight of those 18 works. The retired radio astronomer and his wife, Carol, collect them—along with other art—and a wall of their California home is dedicated to the works.

Well, two days after Christmas, the Epsteins visited the museum, to see our lumia composition. Art handler Franklyn Donahue brought Convolux, Opus 160 up from the basement vault to the prints-and-drawings vault, where Theresa Papanikolas (Curator of European and American Art) and James Jensen (Curator of Contemporary Art) let Epstein have a close look at the work. Epstein was especially excited to see it because he had recently secured from the Yale University archives notes that Wilfred had made about it.

We crowded round him as he went down the document, reading out loud that when Wilfred completed the Lumia in 1966, it went first to Eindhoven, the Netherlands, for a big light exhibition, then was delivered to Clare Boothe Luce in 1967. Luce, who lived in Manhattan and Kahala at the time, in turn lent it to the Honolulu Academy of Arts where it went on view right away for a few weeks. The work was such a hit with viewers that she decided to “move up my plans and give it to them right now.” And she asked Wilfred to make her another one.

Examining the lumia, Epstein said, “It’s one of the most beautiful works he did.” After hearing about how it’s a work of illuminated light, and seeing the fantastic nebulae Opus 161 in Tree of Life, I was underwhelmed by what appeared to be the prototype of an early console TV, one side of it opaque plastic. It looked like something a mid-century American suburban dad tinkered on in his garage.

But we rounded up some chairs, plugged in the plug with fabric-covered(!) wire, and turned off the light. “Look at the colors!” exclaimed Epstein. “I’m blown away.” We all immediately started calling out the faces, landscapes, spacescapes and dreamscapes, and perfect settings for an apotheosis that we saw. Then we just sat in the dark and watched. You can watch for 15 days and 19 hours and not see exactly the same thing. What is on the screen—3D-like, luminous, mysterious, a kind of black magic—seems so sophisticated and modern even to Apple acolytes. The shoddy video snippet above does not do the lumia composition justice.

“I, my wife and my nephew (A.J. Epstein, who is also crazy about lumia, and who has visited the museum to see this composition), are so envious of this work,” said Epstein. Why? What makes it so special compared to the other 17 extant lumia compositions? “The vividness of colors,” said Carol Epstein. “Each composition is different.”

We are one of only six museums to own a Wilfred. The others are the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, Nebraska; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Museum of Modern Art; and the Yale University Art Gallery.

We reluctantly turned the light back on, and we all wanted to open the inside of the box, to see what created the fantastic light show. Donahue gingerly removed the back of the box to reveal what Zinman so perfectly described as “feats of bric-a-brac engineering.” Shards of colored glass, what appear to be jerryrigged hinges, pieces of metal and glue are the ordinary items that produce extraordinary visions.

Epstein takes umbrage at the description, explaining that Wilfred “had decades of technical experience—his instruments are very carefully put together—and they are rugged, often being on exhibit for years! Those hinges and restraint rods are not jerryrigged. And they are not random shards of colored glass he picked up on the beach. What he creates is a complex assembly of carefully shaped reflecting surfaces, moving, slowly, independently of each other, and a slowly rotating color wheel comprised of selected shapes and colors of stained glass.”

Papanikolas is overseeing the reinstallation of galleries one to ten, and is thinking about putting the Convolux on view sometime this year, when there will be an open spot available. We’ll keep you posted.

Every December, the museum holds Kama‘aina Christmas, its gala fundraiser. We are so grateful to the co-chairs, volunteers and attendees who make this amazing event happen—we depend on it. This year’s co-chairs were Susan Ing and Kitty Wo, who put together Merry and Bright—a sexily lit evening of art, food (Chai’s Island Bistro) and music (Honolulu Jazz Quartet with vocals by Starr Kalahiki!) on Dec. 10. Here are a few shots from the evening.

Do you need a holiday pick-me-up? Take a break from shopping at the Fall Young Artists exhibition—the fantastic artwork is guaranteed to put a smile on your face.

At the opening last Saturday, throngs of parents, tutu, aunties, uncles, friends and art fans were on hand to admire the expressive, imaginative work by students who range in age from 5 to 18.

A big thanks to Willow (that’s her pictured above), for letting us use her gorgeous painting Pluto to create the wall graphic. Mahalo to K&D signs for printing and installing the vivid design!

On view through Dec 31
Tues–Sat 10am–4:30pm
Sun 1–4:30pm
Closed Dec 24 and 25

For the “Masterpieces of Landscape Painting from the Forbidden City,”  I had the opportunity to get behind-the-scenes access to the off-limits area of the Palace Museum in Beijing. Academy curator of Asian Art Shawn Eichman and I met the curatorial team of the paintings and calligraphy department in a modern, well-lit room furnished with large armchairs adorned with antimacassars and inspected each painting one by one on a large table.

As they recited the condition notes in Mandarin, Shawn translated their words into English and took shots of every condition detail while I feverishly transcribed for our English version of the condition report. As each painting was unveiled from colorful brocade bags and unfurled before us, I was dazzled by the procession of masterpieces from the Yuan to the Qing dynasties—I felt like Indiana Jones in a cave of treasures. From close up the paintings were awesome to behold.

Our interpreter from the Palace Museum’s Foreign Office kindly treated us to lunch at the staff lunchroom. To get there we walked through alleys flanked by immense walls. These  pathways once traversed by dowager empresses are now traveled by staff bicycling to and fro across the vast areas within the ancient red-walled city of over 900 buildings—the largest palace complex in the world. Entering the functional lunchroom through a plastic curtain straight from a walk-in freezer, I was met by chairs and long tables reminiscent of my school days and large steaming trays of rice, chow fun, vegetables and other delicious offerings with the popular brown sauce often seen on Mandarin dishes.