Art in museums is one thing—you can spend all day gazing at it once you're inside. However, a lot of good art is outside, on the street. There, a viewer driving by at thirty mph catches only a glimpse, and that's all the time a roadside artist gets to make an impression.
Peter Capriotti of Haiku, Maui—his friends call him "Capri"—knows how to tell a story in a glimpse. People say that he makes signs. But the word "sign" is a bit reductive, suggesting little more than stark instructions. Who thinks of "RAISED X-WALK" as art? Capri is surely an artist, one of the most viewed and also probably least recognized artists on Maui, but what he makes goes beyond aesthetics. Capri makes symbols.
Take for example his Historic Wailuku sign, standing on a grassy median. Drivers entering Wailuku from (less historic) Kahului see its two-inch-thick clear heart redwood, sand-carved and painted boldly on both sides, against the backdrop of a spreading flame tree and an overhead bridge that suggests a portal into the old Maui capital. The shape is curvaceous ("I try to get away from square signs," says Capri), and its white and sky-blue colors shine regardless what the weather might be.
The image depicts Wailuku as a row of single-story shops anchored by the antiquated spire of a missionary church. It disregards the actual fortress-like bulk of the county courthouse and the dull tower where the mayor's office sits, taller than any other structure on the island. In other words, this isn't just a sign.
"Artist, sculptor, goldsmith, master craftsman," Capri calls himself. "I started painting signs in grade school. I was a kid who didn't do anything but paint things and make things." He estimates that during his nearly fifty years on Maui, he's made a thousand wooden signs and worked with ten tons of redwood. He's also made the most granite signs in the state, he says. "I developed my own techniques. My signs are absolutely the best quality in the world—three-dimensional signs that have personality, that get somebody's attention."
That sounds like a boast, but any driver can stop and test Capri's claim. For the Wailuku sign, as with all his projects in wood, he planed and joined the foot-wide lumber so neatly that the seams are invisible. He works, as always, with quarter-sawn material with straight, visible grain that resists warping. (If the design calls for it, he'll join planks with contrasting grains.) "You gotta know how to read the wood," Capri says.
"First I carve it," says Maui sign maker Peter "Capri" Capriotti (seen at banner image), seen above and on the title page. "Then three coats of high-quality primer, like painting a car. Then I paint the details. Nobody does the craft anymore. Nobody does gold leaf anymore." Capri's signs are some of the most recognizable works of art on the Valley Isle, often outlasting the places for which he created them.
Then he carved between the design elements, sanding and priming repeatedly. Paint? He always uses automotive acrylic enamel, "the most durable, and most expensive, paint you can buy." Then, of course, a piece like this has to be installed. That step requires skills even heftier than carpentry and color. Any good sign maker needs to be a wall builder, a mason, a truck driver and sometimes a heavy equipment operator. "Stone, wood, anything—I'll blast it," says Capri. Sometimes he carves HDU, high-density urethane foam, which has the texture of balsa wood. He calls himself a "practical artist." His creations must stand alone night and day, enduring the exhaust of traffic and the blasts of storms. Above all, he says, "I like to do stuff that lasts."
Capri's gallery, so to speak, runs from Kauai to Hawaii Island, but the great majority of his pieces are on Maui, where he has lived since 1975. Residents of Upcountry Maui will recognize at a glance the white lettering on Calasa Garage. This well-preserved relic sits at the bottom of Kula's most treacherous downhill noodle, Copp Road. The current owner pumps gas when he feels like it. Capri's lettering still looks new.
Most Upcountry residents, though, have likely never seen "The Pinnacle," Capri's award-winning emblem for a gated community of multi-million-dollar homes in Kaanapali Golf Estates. This eye-smacking signature work, done in gold leaf on a huge slice of black granite, won him a top international award in the monument signs category from Signs of the Times magazine. He did the Hertz car rental signs for all the islands, in foam then airbrushed. His "Welcome to Kauai" signs at the airport in Lihue are still in good shape. For these, he says, "I carved all the Hawaiian Islands in foam, then airbrushed."
The list goes on: The entry sign for Bailey House Museum, on the way to Iao Valley State Park, with its vivid, two-tone poi pounder, stands out. His graceful Kulamalu sign, which marks the recent extension of Pukalani toward Maui's Upcountry high school, is affixed to one of Capri's sturdy stone walls. The Napili Point sign includes a three-dimensional turtle cruising under the waves. The Andaz Resort in Wailea is awash with Capri's signs. He's particularly proud of the intricately carved koa surfboard hanging above the resort's Bumbye Beach Bar.
Alas, though. Unlike the Louvre, Capri's outdoor venues have a habit of disappearing. The economy shifts. Businesses go bust. The photos in Capri's scrapbook commemorate many super-cool venues that have gone with the economic wind. You see thirty-foot murals that vanished when popular restaurants went under. The most egregious of these disappointments occurred in a single day, August 8, 2023, when Lahaina burned to the ground. Capri's works had once helped to define the very image of Front Street.
Lahaina was Capri's entry-point to Hawaii, in 1975. Having some training in jewelry design, he worked casting gold rings at 505 Front Street.
Capri, a grizzled, cowboy-hat-wearing Sicilian Italian whose personal motto seems to be "I never stop evolving," transplanted himself to Maui in 1975 at the age of 30. He painted a mural at the Happy Valley Tavern, then worked on Front Street casting gold jewelry. He made friends from Upcountry playing soccer in the local league, then decided that was the place for him. And yet, his heartfelt roots are in New Orleans—by way of Ustica.
Who's ever heard of Ustica? It's a rocky island three miles wide, with no natural source of fresh water, located some three dozen miles north of Palermo, Sicily. Only a thousand people live there. But back in the early 1900s the Ustican population grew too large; hundreds of families chose to emigrate, most to New Orleans. This maternal foundation explains why he cooks Cajun, loves the operatic singing of Mario Lanza and admires jazz entertainer Louis Prima, whose mother was Ustican. Capri keeps a photo of his own mother posted prominently in his house. He remembers her telling him as a young child that he is an artist.
Being the son of a career officer in the US Air Force, a recruiter, Capri was thrust into extreme situations. He spent high school years in Wiesbaden, Germany, then was transported to Jackson, Mississippi, for his senior year. This was 1963; he had a mustache, and "there was always a bully wanting to mess with you." Disgusted by deep-South racism, he took off, hitchhiking to Washington DC to attend John F. Kennedy's funeral, then to New York.
In New York he took on grunt work, took some art classes and saved the money he made working three jobs. By creating some paintings on the tops of blank pizza boxes, he won himself a scholarship to the San Francisco School of Fine Art. So he bought a VW van and drove west. Hey, it was the '60s.
One brief anecdote epitomizes his life on the West Coast. When the infamous concert at Altamont Raceway took place in December 1969, Capri worked with San Francisco's "acid king" Owsley Stanley to put up the Wall of Sound—a massive sound system with speaker cabinets stacked three stories high. "Mick Jagger was scared to death," he remembers.
Around that same time, as is well known, Maui began to experience a friendly, easygoing emigration of folks from the West Coast, Capri among them. Many of these emigrants became valuable members of the island community. Capri, for example, has always been a fervent booster of Maui's welfare. He's done the St. Jude's Ride for thirty years, helping to raise funds for the St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Tennessee. He's been a colorful participant in the annual Makawao Rodeo Parade (often as his alter ego, Zorro), and served as director starting in 1990.
Yet his most enduring achievement as a symbol maker on Maui, as an artist who puts the community's best intentions in the best light, will be the Hana Millennium Legacy Trail Marker. A pillar six feet tall, it has stood for twenty-four years now at the zero-mile point on the Hana Highway. The square figure tapers gently to its flat top, crowned with a stone wrapped in kapa (bark cloth) and standing upright like a flame. The monument is faced with black lava stones brought to the site by Hana elder Francis Sinenci and a crew of volunteers. The stones represent each of the twenty-two communities along the famed East Maui route, and Capri, who built the pillar, engraved the stones with the names of each district, from Paia to Kanaio. A sheet of polished granite embedded at the pillar's summit bears an eye-catching design in patriotic red, white and blue.
The idea of Millennium Trails started in the Clinton White House in the middle of 1999, as the world anticipated the coming drama of the new year. At that point a federal commission selected seventeen historic routes across the continent. But it was only after the turn of the millennium that Capri and others in Hawaii, including Representative Patsy Mink, sought a designation in the Islands. Aided by many others, particularly the Hana community and kumu (teacher) Sam Kaai, who blessed the event, Capri took the initiative to get this done.
Twenty years later a second major project was undertaken to link the pillar in Haiku to the other end of the "trail," to Hana. The idea was to honor a Native daughter who became, undeniably, one the foremost figures in Hawaiian history: Kaahumanu, who was born in a cave at Hana Bay.
The wildfires of August 8, 2023 that destroyed Lahaina also claimed many of Capri's iconic signs, like the one Mick Fleetwood is holding for his popular restaurant and nightlife spot, Fleetwood's on Front Street. The sign barely survived; the restaurant was unfortunately lost.
Capri served as the "producer/director" for the project. Its result is an eight-foot-tall bronze statue of the queen, which stands today on a four-foot stone dais before Kauiki Head, the volcanic hill that forms the bay. Although Capri does bronze work, he deferred the actual manufacture to an artist who he knew had the studio and capacity beyond anything in Hawaii. He went to Thailand.
He'd been visiting Chiang Mai for years. He first went for dental work but ended up enamored of the people and the culture. He says, "I get respect there. They love jazz. Everything is reasonable. The work ethic is incredible." He discovered the huge but low-tech studio of Pete Santi, where a crew of thirty are constantly producing Buddhist temple figures. "They are so devoted to the craft," Capri says, and Santi got the commission from the County of Maui. Capri had to make sure the statue looked Hawaiian, not Thai, and that the figure arrived safely. The people of Hana provided the appropriate welcome.
He's now working on a book called 50/50 Fifty Years of Signs in the Fiftieth State beginning with petroglyphs and scrimshaw, onboard ship signs, Lahaina storefronts and a sprawling gallery of his own works, including a dozen now-demolished murals. "I want to record my place in the tradition of sign making," he says. At the same time, that monumental sculpture project at Hana has fired up his ambitions. "I haven't made bronze sculptures since 1977. This desire is coming back." His own kitchen includes scale models of such projects, including a dynamic miniature of Maui the demigod snaring the sun.
"Now, after fifty years of commercial art, I want to come back and perfect my fine art." It's a beautiful circle, he says, to perfect your desires.
"No-brakes Capri, that's me. No boundaries. I'm motivated. I don't know why but I'm motivated. What won't kill me will make me stronger. I'm lucky to be here—me and Mick Jagger."
