Review: This IS Hawai'i

Abstract

For the past five years, Kanaka Maoli (aboriginal Hawaiian) and non-Kanaka Maoli audiences have converged in Washington DC to attend the Hawai'i Festival, an event held every May over a period of two days at the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI). This year's gathering was noteworthy in that it included for the first time a collaborative exhibition of contemporary Kanaka Maoli art at the museum and at the smaller nonprofit gallery, [End Page 214] Transformer. Titled This IS Hawai'i, the goal of the multi-sited exhibition was to dismantle the prevailing notion of Hawai'i as a place of paradisiacal allure and exotic otherness—a perception that has been ardently cultivated through the visual and cinematic arts as well as through touristic marketing practices—by re-presenting Hawai'i from an aboriginal perspective.