Showcasing Hawai‘i’s Masterworks

In 2005, only one year after HPA opened the Isaacs Art Center (IAC), the Tennent Art Foundation in Honolulu made a bold decision: entrusting HPA and its newly opened art center to house the world’s largest intact body of work by renowned artist Madge Tennent. Tennent (1889-1972) was a classically trained painter and child prodigy who fueled the advent of Hawaiian Modernism. The Tennent Collection at HPA is extensive, consisting of over 100 artworks: 103 paintings and drawings, and one plaster of paris model for her sculpture, “Striding Woman.” Of the 103, nearly 30 are large scale paintings in oil and gouache.

Lei Queen Fantasia is one of these: a colossal oil painting created from two canvases sewn together. “Artistic determination meets the challenge of limited material!” says IAC Director Mollie Hustace, describing the piece. “The compelling wahine wearing a white head lei is surrounded by her friends, her colleagues, a hui of lei makers, working independently while enjoying the camaraderie of their artistic pursuit.” Hustace goes on: “Thematically, Madge captured the strength and grandeur of Hawaiian women and all women. Artistically, she composed a powerful scene… a circle of dynamic women built from curvilinear abstract shapes, whirling textures, and brilliant gem colors that all resolve at a distance.” It is, indeed, spectacular… a treasure among treasures.

Community Arts Program hosts hundreds of local students

While completing her interdisciplinary master’s of education at UH Mānoa, Mollie Hustace produced a master’s thesis focused on meeting national and state fine arts standards in a rural art gallery. The case study? Isaacs Art Center. Her thesis became the foundation for the center’s Community Arts Program, or CAP. The resoundingly popular CAP offers a museum-based arts education curriculum and shares the center’s collection with pre-K to grade 12 students from public and private schools throughout North and South Kohala.

Hustace, who holds a bevy of degrees from Stanford and UH Mānoa, has no shortage of ambition for Isaacs Art Center and its Tennent collection. She envisions a new book on Tennent and her contribution to 20th century modernism in Hawai‘i as well as her place in international art history; an IAC Annex to increase climate-controlled storage and add exhibition space; inclusion of Tennent artwork in larger museum exhibitions, particularly retrospectives of 20th century modernist art and art by women; possible capstone collaborations; a digital exhibition; and more.

And why not? The Tennent works constitute a remarkable and singular flagship collection, and the Isaacs Art Center also holds pieces by many other wellestablished artists of Hawai‘i, as well as a growing assemblage of work by contemporary artists and makers who honor and celebrate Hawai‘i through watercolors, kapa, koa, and other media. “Visitors are often stunned by what they find here,” Hustace says. “They recognize something quite special in the Tennent collection that one would normally see in a continental museum. But here we are in up-country Waimea!”

Isaacs Art Center is free and open to the public Monday through Friday, 10am to 4pm. •

Through CAP, which has historically been supported by local foundations including the Atherton Family Foundation and the Samuel N. and Mary Castle Foundation, IAC annually hosts hundreds of local students who learn about everything from perspective and pattern to symmetry and texture through the masterworks of Hawai‘i’s most renowned artists. •