ABOVE: A Thai Buddha in meditation at the Mauna Kea Beach Hotel, one of the many museum-quality art objects from the Asia-Pacific region that the hotel has restored in partnership with Bishop Museum.
One of Hawaii's most impressive art collections isn't in a museum but a hotel: the Mauna Kea Beach Hotel, developed by Laurance S. Rockefeller, grandson of John D. Rockefeller. When it opened in 1965, MKBH was groundbreaking not only as the first hotel to be built on Hawaii Island's Kohala coast, but also as one of the first US hotels with a museum-quality art collection.
Rockefeller grew up around art and was a serious collector. He appointed a team to assemble a collection of Pacific and Asian art for the resort and made some of his own selections while traveling in Asia from 1962 to 1963, including a Papua New Guinea ancestor figure and a twelfth-century granite Indian Buddha. Rockefeller also made two key commissions—master kapa (bark cloth) maker Malia Solomon created fourteen pieces, and quilter Mealii Kalama, with the help of Kawaiahao Church parishioners, sewed thirty quilts—highlights of the collection. The hotel opened with a collection of more than 1,600 works.
Rockefeller envisioned the art as an integral part of the hotel, displayed in public, open-air spaces. But more than fifty years of salt air and sunlight have taken a toll. In 2017 the hotel reached out to Bishop Museum for help. The steward of Hawaiian cultural material took on the conservation of the kapa, which dates back earlier than the 1960s. Solomon had acquired hundred-year-old sheets of kapa moe, or bedding, and decorated them using traditional ohe kapala (hand-carved bamboo stamps).
The Bishop team also mapped out a re-display project, creating custom, protective frames and designing new faux-basalt plinths fabricated by a California-based company specializing in set design. "We used gaskets and special materials to make [frames and vitrines that are] economically viable and effective from a conservation standpoint," says Brad Evans, Bishop Museum's director of exhibits. Now most of the pieces are back on view, still accessible to guests, but sealed off from the ravages of UV rays and bugs. Quilts and statues have also been restored, and moving forward, MKBH is working with Waimea-based Island Eclectic, the art restoration firm of Hawaii artists Margo Ray and Scott Yoell. Next up for some TLC are Papua New Guinea masks, Japanese tansu (cabinets) and more statues.
"We don't take this responsibility lightly," says MKBH manager Kansas Henderson, who oversees the $1 million project, which also includes digitizing the collection and creating an app. "We're bringing the collection into the next century. It has been an honor to keep Laurance Rockefeller's vision alive."
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