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The Queue: Lehuauakea

Lehuauakea’s expansive kapa practice bridges traditional Native Hawaiian knowledge and contemporary ways of being. In The Queue, the artist, who splits their time between O‘ahu and Santa Fe, New Mexico, shares about making their own tools, archival research into kapa, and what they’re working on now. 

Interview by Shivaun Watchorn
June 4, 2025

Photo by Laura Ulanova

Lehuauakea holds Lupe Hīhīmanu (Manta Ray Kite), a 2023 kite made from kapa, bamboo, and hibiscus cordage, and decorated with earth pigment and wildfire charcoal, 32 x 33 in.

The first time Lehuauakea made kapa—a Native Hawaiian bark cloth derived from the wauke tree that is often dyed with plants and decorated with stamped geometric patterns—they felt an instant connection.

“Especially after spending so much time on the continent, there was something in me that just felt right. It felt like I’d come home to myself,” says the artist, who was born and raised in Portland, Oregon, and now splits their time between O‘ahu and New Mexico. Learning under kapa master Wesley Sen, who helped to resurrect kapa making during the Hawaiian Renaissance in the 1970s, Lehuauakea has been exploring every facet of the medium, from growing the wauke trees to creating the tools used to decorate the cloth. Their body of work encompasses cascading installations, intricately adorned garments, and traditional Hawaiian kites. Catharine Lo Griffin wrote about Lehuauakea and the other artists practicing—and expanding—the art of kapa in “Beauty in the Bark” in the Summer 2025 issue of American Craft, which is now available for purchase

How do you describe your work or practice in 50 words or less?

My work is grounded in the revival of traditional Native Hawaiian bark cloth (kapa), a sustainable, nonwoven textile made from the beaten bark of certain trees. Though coming from ancestral roots, my practice seeks to expand on this tradition and bring it into a contemporary context, making kapa relevant to stories and experiences today.

Photo courtesy of the artist

Lehuauakea draped in Finding My Way Back Home, 2024, hand-stitched kapa, indigo dye, 62.5 x 50 in.

What are you working on right now? 

I’ve always got a bunch of things in progress, but I’m currently really excited to be experimenting more with natural plant dyes to create varying shades of chromatic black on kapa, which I then plan to hand stitch, quilt, and paint on. This new body of work will be primarily for an upcoming exhibition at Center for Contemporary Arts Santa Fe this August, where I’ll be exploring ideas relating to Native Hawaiian cosmology and creation cycles.

You were recently awarded a grant from the Walker Youngbird Foundation that will culminate in a solo exhibition in New York in 2026. What are you working on for the grant? 

Some of the pieces are ones that I’m working on for my August show at Center for Contemporary Arts Santa Fe. I’m also in the planning phase for the new works to be shown at Nunu Fine Art in New York, which will include additional pieces in an ongoing series of paintings using earth pigments and metal leaf on kapa. I’m also developing concepts for larger-scale works that build off of previous pieces where I’ve suspended kapa and pushed the boundaries of the medium.

Photo courtesy of Mario Gallucci

Lehuauakea’s 2024 installation Hoʻoulu Pū (Growing Together), 15 x 10 ft.

  • Photo courtesy of the artist

    I Walk With My Ancestors I, 2023, ochre pigment and wildfire charcoal hand-painted on kapa, 61.5 x 29 in.

  • Photo courtesy of the artist

    Kūmauna, 2024, ochre pigments hand painted on kapa, 48 x 26 in.

Where do the tools you use for working with kapa come from? What goes into the design and construction of your tools? 

All of the tools I use to create kapa are traditional tools, the same that my ancestors would have used hundreds of years ago. I hand carve all of the ʻohe kāpala (bamboo printing tools) myself, and have gradually built up my collection of these tools to several dozen over the past few years. Some of my iʻe kuku (wooden beaters) I carved myself, and others were gifted to me by people in the kapa-making community, including my mentor Wesley Sen and master kapa maker Dalani Tanahy. My kua kuku (wooden anvils) were made by my partner, Ian Kualiʻi. The overall structure of the tools replicates the traditional and precontact samples we know to exist, some of which I have in my own collection. The patterns on these tools are a blend of contemporary patterns I design myself based on traditional motifs, as well as ancestral patterns that I am culturally permitted to use as they are noa (disregulated and free of greater restriction for the proper purpose).

Part of your practice is making lupe, or traditional Hawaiian kites. Can you tell us more about the construction of and uses for these kites? 

Traditional lupe are still making a comeback in Native Hawaiian material culture. In 2022 I received a grant from Native Arts and Cultures Foundation to re-create these traditional kapa kites using only natural materials I personally gathered and processed. The construction methods for making the different kites largely came from trial and error in response to archival research I’d previously done at the Bishop Museum and Burke Museum. Traditionally made of kapa and bound with fibers often made from hibiscus bark, these kites were customarily used for ceremony, fishing, recreation, and religious purposes by a select class of priestly or chiefly lineages.

Photo courtesy of the artist

Traditional bamboo ‘ohe kāpala printing tools made by the artist in 2019, approximately 12 to 19 in.

What natural colorings do you use for your artworks? Where do you source them? 

Though I occasionally work with natural plant dyes, I most often work with earth pigments because of how they respond to the surface of the kapa and how well they hold up over time. These ochres and pigments are soils I responsibly gather myself, mostly from my ancestral homelands in Hawaiʻi along with some I gathered in Oregon when I was still living there. I’ve also received micaceous sand pigment from New Mexico through a trade I did with Taos Pueblo potter Brandon Ortiz.

If you were going to design a dream room in your house, which craftspeople’s work would you include? 

As a traditional textile maker, I’m naturally drawn to textile traditions from other cultures. Right now, I’m really inspired by Navajo master weaver and artist D.Y. Begay. I’d also have to include Oaxacan Zapotec weaver Porfirio Gutiérrez, and the community of weavers at Centro de Textiles Tradicionales del Cusco in Chinchero, Peru. Lastly, I’d love to have pieces from Oceania/Pasifika makers such as Niuean-Māori bark cloth maker Cora-Allan Wickliffe, CHamoru weaver and designer Roquin-Jon Quichocho Siongco, and maybe some historical Hawaiian pieces rescued from auctions.

Puka Komo ʻEkahi: Portal to Grant Permission, 2024, earth pigments and metal leaf on kapa, 28 x 28 in.

Which craft artists, exhibitions, or projects do you think the world should know about, and why?

All of the artists whose work I mentioned previously are worth doing a deep dive into. I might be a bit biased, but I also think more people should know about the ongoing bark cloth revival happening in the Native Hawaiian community, and the history of why it is so important to our culture from both a cultural and environmental standpoint. Hawaiʻi and Hawaiian culture have so many harmful stereotypes applied to us that continue to box in contemporary practitioners and artists, so learning more about the history and significance of Hawaiian kapa helps to unravel those incorrect assumptions and see how kapa fits into a contemporary sphere of Indigenous art as a whole.

Photo courtesy of M. Earl Williams

Since the Beginning and End of Time, 2024, is a hand-embroidered cloak of indigo-dyed kapa with bells and shell buttons, 44 x 50 in.

Shivaun Watchorn is associate editor of American Craft.

See more of Lehuauakea's work online.

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This article was made possible with support from the Windgate Foundation.

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