Seven alumni of McKinley High School are being honored in a show at Honolulu Museum of Art.
by Adam Schrader
The museum will be presenting “Home of the Tigers,” a tribute to McKinley High School in Honolulu, which boasts an alumni including artists Satoru Abe, Raymond Han, and Robert Kobayashi, among others. The exhibition is accompanied by “Satoru Abe: Reaching for the Sun,” a major retrospective that unpacks the Hawaii-born artist’s oeuvre of abstract sculptures and paintings, which spans the greater part of a century.
“Home of the Tigers” is co-curated by married curator duo Tyler Cann and Alejandra Rojas Silva. “Satoru Abe: Reaching for the Sun” was curated by Silva with Katherine Love, HoMA’s associate curator of contemporary art.
Satoru Abe, Proud Old Tree (1958). Photo courtesy of Satoru Abe
Between the 1920s and ’40s, McKinley High School, one of Hawaii’s oldest public high schools, saw students from Abe to Kobayashi, John Chin Young to Ralph Iwamoto and Keichi Kimura, as well as Raymond Han; another artist, ʻImaikalani Kalahele, graduated a generation later in 1966. Besides tracing the journey of these seven students, “Home of the Tigers” also follows three art teachers—Minnie Fujita, Charles Higa, and Shirley Russell—who quietly incubated the creative talent in their classrooms.
Image credit: Satoru Abe, Two Figures in the Forest (2002). Photo courtesy of Satoru Abe.
