Hawaiian Kingdom Lives on at Uncle Robert’s Awa Bar By Stefan Verbano
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KeOlaMagazine.com | January - February 2022
ig Polynesian hands hoisted the massive tile “puzzlepiece” mural upright at last, and Rika Blue took a step back to admire her creation for the first time in its rightful place. This moment was the vindication of years’ worth of work for Rika: countless hours spent rolling out and cutting the clay pieces, carving three-dimensional motifs into them, glazing, firing, epoxying, grouting, and sealing, all at her pottery studio next door to the sprawling open-air market complex known as “Uncle Robert’s” in the village of Kalapana. It’s here, at the market’s main entrance, that the imposing six-foot-tall ceramic disk emblazoned with the Kingdom of Hawai‘i’s Royal Crest was to be unveiled.
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Robert Keli‘iho‘omalu, Sr.—the late, beloved patriarch of old Kalapana Village—is the market’s namesake, whose children now run its day-to-day operations. It was friends and relatives of the Keli‘iho‘omalu family who heaved the mural into place in mid-March 2021, dead-lifting what Rika estimates to have been between 300 and 500 pounds, bracing it upright with their bodies against the heavy-duty, custom-built metal frame cemented into the ground while a welding torch hissed and sparked away on the opposite side. “We were all just standing around cheering them on,” Rika, interviewed later, says of those anxious moments before the unwieldy art piece was secured. “We just kept shouting, ‘Hold on!’”
Rika Blue’s massive tile mural depicting the Kingdom of Hawaiÿi’s Royal Crest, as it can be seen today at the entrance of Uncle Robert’s Market in the East Hawaiÿi village of Kalapana. The wooden “Uncle’s Awa Club” sign was added after the unveiling to mark the location for visitors. photo by Stefan Verbano
