By Nanea Lum

Softcover, 140 pp
7.5 x 10 inches

Hele a Hoʻi is an artists’ book by Nanea Lum. It weaves together five years of creative practice from 2018–2023, organized by chapters of media studies and bodies of work. Nanea’s areas of focus during this period included Hawaiian traditional craft techniques, decolonizing art, and place-based learning through indigenous knowledges. Nanea has built an understanding of what it means to paint in collaboration with ʻāina and the water systems embedded in it. Hele a Hoʻi shares this epistemology of place through her process, narrative, and materiality.

Bio: Nanea Lum is a Native Hawaiian artist whose practice ranges from kapa to large scale oil paintings. Her kapa is produced from plant material that she personally harvested and processed, dyed with inks from homemade charcoal, earth pigments, and plants. Her paintings are abstract land and ocean scapes that apply cultural concepts of creation that bridge the worlds between creation and creating. She is a graduate of the BFA (2014) and MFA (2021) programs of the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. She has most recently exhibited at NADA New York and NADA Miami, and ʻAi Pōhaku on ʻOahu.