Aloha one and all!

May I start 2017 at the Honolulu Museum of Art by wishing you Hau‘oli Makahiki Hou! I am excited, honored and humbled to be appointed the new director of this special and spectacular community institution, and I am looking forward to meeting all of you this year.

As many of you already know, it has been more than three decades since I left Hawai‘i as a teenager to go off to college on the Mainland. During that time, I lived in three countries, up to 12 time zones away. However, every day, without fail, I dreamt of my beautiful childhood in Honolulu, skipping down the corridors of the “Art Academy” every Saturday, feeding the fish in the Chinese Courtyard, and looking at the French Impressionist paintings as I waited for my father to pick me up. During my last visit this summer, all of the museum locations were as marvelously beautiful as I remembered them!

As a child, the museum's new director Sean O'Harrow took art classes at the museum. Here he is proudly posing beside one of his works in one of the museum's corridors.

New museum director Sean O’Harrow took art classes at the museum as a child. Here he is in front of one of his art school creations that was displayed at Kahala Mall.

Without doubt, 2017 will be yet another remarkable year for the museum, and for me, it will be a return to the place that means so much to me, as I am sure it does to all of you. Together, I am confident that we will take the museum to new heights and make it a place that all people in Hawai’i want to enjoy!

Happy 2017 and I look forward to seeing you at a museum event very soon.

Mahalo nui loa!

Sean O’Harrow
Director

 

1.2.2016