ABOVE: Ruben Aira Jr. rarely lacks for source material, especially during the winter season, when punishing North Shore waves break many a waverider's boards and bones.
Ruben Aira Jr. likes to take apart surfboards. "There's something beautiful about things that are designed to be functional," Aira says on a recent morning in his garage in Hawaii Kai. On a resin-covered table before him lie slivers of old, pointy-nosed shortboards, cut lengthwise and curving gently. "They look organic without me doing anything to them," he says. The boards' rocker—the curve that helps a surfer avoid nose-diving on a steep drop—struck Aira as petals that he could fuse together into a flowerlike sculpture. "People don't even think about it," he says. "It doesn't occur to them that it's anything more than waste."
Aira, a 60-year-old former wave-rider himself, has turned trashed surfboards into a successful art career. For a few years he created trophies for the Vans Triple Crown, a trio of surf contests at Haleiwa, Sunset Beach and Pipeline, as well as other World Surf League events. He'd carve broken boards from one year's contest into trophies for the next. (John John Florence, Carissa Moore and Kelly Slater have some of them.) One of his sculptures, "Hohonu"—an old, yellowed longboard split lengthwise with its insides carved into sharp, organic swirls painted white and fused back together—received the Merit Award in Mixed Media Arts at the 2024 Hawaii Craftsmen Annual Statewide Exhibition.
Apart from carving sculptures—including trophies for prestigious surfing competitions—Aira's art keeps foam and fiberglass out of the landfill.
Born in Cuba and raised in Maryland, Aira grew up spending time in art museums. He went to art school for a few years and traveled for more. He ended up on the North Shore in his early thirties, had kids and never left Hawaii. A job making prints for aloha shirts—flowers and kapa (bark cloth) patterns—was "a good crash course in Hawaii," he says. He had mostly worked with wood, but one day he started carving up an old, broken board in relief. He grew bored with that. "I was about to give up and just move on to doing something else," he says. But then he asked himself, "Are you giving up because there's really nowhere else you could take this, or because you're giving up?" He broke up a board and reconfigured it into a sculpture. That, he liked. "When I started doing this I was poor," he says, "and sometimes poverty makes you more creative than when you're comfortable."
Aira rarely suffers for lack of material. Surf bums looking to make a buck collect bundles of broken boards along the North Shore and sell them to Aira for cheap; good Samaritans drop them off outside his gate. (Winter is the most bountiful season for broken boards.) And the margins are decent. "These guys that come here on vacation, they got so much money, they come over to my house—'I'll take that one and that one and that one, too,'" Aira says. The most important element is the least expensive, he says. "Creativity is free if you're willing to look at something differently."
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