Mari Matsuda: I try to make art that gives us hope and energy | Honolulu Museum of Art

Mari Matsuda: I try to make art that gives us hope and energy | Honolulu Museum of Art
To the cookie settings
To the main content
To the footer
Interview
Fri Dec 12 2025
Mari Matsuda: I try to make art that gives us hope and energy
In Gallery 10, two large-scale woodcut prints tell stories of times when community solidarity altered the course of life in Hawai‘i. Made with expressive, dynamic lines, the works are part of a five-print series titled For the Future by Mari Matsuda. In the tradition of 20th-century social protest art, she commemorates the 1977 Waiāhole-Waikāne community protest against proposed eviction of farmers from  this fertile area, and the Great Sugar Strike of 1946. You have until Jan. 4 to see the stirring
Hell No, We Ain’t Moving and The Fishing Committee of the Great Sugar Strike of 1946.
Matsuda was born to create this art that you can feel is clearly born of deep conviction and principles. Her Nisei (second generation in Hawai‘i) parents were Marxist labor activists, and she became an internationally known legal scholar who was a leading voice in the development of critical race theory as well as the first Asian American female tenured law professor in the US. On top of that, she has a lifelong appreciation of art and has been coming to the Honolulu Museum of Art since she was a child.
After retiring from her distinguished academic career in 2022, she earned an MFA in printmaking at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa in 2024, motivated by a cancer diagnosis that spurred a sense of urgency. (It thankfully has been successfully treated.) She excelled at her chosen medium and in an astonishingly short amount of time has made a mark in Hawai‘i art. Her installation
Radical Wahine of Honolulu
, 1945 at Aupuni Space garnered a review in
Artforum
magazine.
The Museum acquired
For the Future
in 2024. “This is a significant acquisition from a new voice in the arts in Hawai‘i,” says Alejandra Rojas Silva, curator of European and American art who was instrumental in the purchase of the prints. “Mari references a 20th-century iconography of social protest to connect contemporary audiences to the history of social activism in Hawai‘i.”
We are grateful Matsuda spent time answering our questions about her art, practice, and life.
How did you choose events to depict in your series
For the Future
I started making these in a dark time. It was during Covid, and I wanted to inspire. These are all examples of ordinary people standing up for what they believed in and pulling off something astonishing. A lot of young people I encounter who really care about things like the environment feel helpless and small and discouraged. When I ask them what they think they can do about it they they say, “I don’t know it’s so bad.” I think we need to leverage ourselves out of that kind of fatalism about things that are major threats to human existence. [Through my art] I want to say I’ve seen big wins happen. We can change lives for the better.
Your works are about specific moments in time, are they based on photographs? Or did you create your own compositions based on your knowledge of the events?
For
[Hell No, We Ain’t Moving]
I used news photos and a scratchy old video called
Two Green Valleys
, so it is a composite. I also went to the valley and sat there and communed with the mountains and the plants. The scene setting, like the background, is not exactly true to lilfe. I moved the kalo forward. So every plant that was growing then is in that picture. All those crops are still there today.
Which is an enduring sign of that win.
Yes! [Under the proposed development plan] it was supposed to look like Kalama Valley.  Completely paved over. Today Waiāhole-Waikāne is still ag land, and I know descendents of the people in that picture who are still farming there. That’s why these prints are
“for the future.” Hawai‘i needs sustainable ag. We need a way to feed ourselves if the boats stop coming. They were saying that back then.
Are the prominently featured figures real folks? For example, in
Hell No, We Ain’t Moving
, is the man with a megaphone a real person?
Yes, that is Bobby Fernandez, a farmer who really had to step up and become a leader, it’s a beautiful story.
Were you here at the time of the Waiāhole-Waikāne protest?
Yes, I went out there for fundraisers. It was a common thing for young people to support farmers back then, go to the valley, walk through the mud to see all the popular musicians and comedians of the era performing. Half the people in the image are UH students. I was in law school at the time.
The solidarity expressed in
The Fishing Committee
is so moving. What was it like creating this print?
I wasn’t alive during the 1946 Sugar Strike, but my mom was, and was active in the
ILWU
(International and Longshore and Warehouse Union). They had an organizational chart, listing the fishing committee, the hunting committee, a farmer outreach committee.  They went to the small truck farmers and asked them for donations. There was a committee that went to the little stores and asked them for contributions. There was a lot of community support and it took huge organizational skills to mobilize it.
The strike went on for months. The strategy was to put everyone on a committee so they had a valued job and didn’t focus on negativity and rumors. The Fishing Committee represents that to me. From the faces in the print you can see it was so multiracial. This work is based on an actual photograph from the ILWU Local 142 archives on the strike. I stayed pretty true to the original composition.
I learned so much from doing that print. When it was up in my thesis exhibition [at UH], one of my former research assistants, Ciara Kahahane [now
First Deputy of the Commission on Water Resource Management
], came, saw the print, and said, “That’s my grandfather.” That’s Mr. Kahahane, from a storied fishing family in Lahaina. He is the large, sweet-faced Kanaka man in the print. Another friend came and looked at the fish and said, “Oh, that’s awa.” A friend from the Philippines came and said, “Oh that’s bangus.” The haul in that print was a much-loved delicacy across the Pacific. This was the first multiracial strike so they had to feed everybody and match everybody’s food taste. The awa/bangus was a perfect example of that.
The sugar companies really thought they were going to win because these people were making starvation wages and had never once had a successful strike. How would they survive without income? But they did survive because of their community support and strategy. They were able to feed themselves.
I’ve been thinking about how our grandparents could feed themselves through the work of their hands and we have lost that. I just built a chicken coop and got three chickens. The egg shortage terrified me.
Do you think this kind of solidarity still exists in Hawai‘i?
Absolutely. I think there are so many people who recoginize that we’re in trouble and who care about the future. You saw that in the Red Hill protests where a lot of kūpuna came out, people who had never participated in a protest before but understood the importance of having clean water in Hawai‘i. I think Labor is not as strong as it was at the height of the ILWU, but I still see Local 5 and other unions protesting so people can earn a living wage. They have a lot of community support because even people who are privileged recognize that it’s wrong that people have to work two and three jobs to sustain their families. People know this. The potential for organizing and getting healthy public policy is there. I’ve seen it, particularly with young Kanaka Maoli who are ready to stand up.
What do these events mean to you in relation to you as a legal scholar and activist and artist?
I think it’s all the same work. In law, a lot of my work was around anti-subordination theory, unpacking the anti-social effects of false hierarchies, like patriarchy. Critical race theory and feminist theory are about that.
I’m a constitutionalist—I want to live in a society supported by humane values and principles codified in rule-based committments. If you look at the preamble of the US constitution, that’s what it says.  It’s designed to make a way for people to prosper together in peace. I think that goal is important. My legal work asked what legal rules and principles best promote democracy, justice, and fairness for everyone. The guys on the fishing committee of the ILWU and the people on the line in Waiāhole-Waikāne holding off evictions were doing the same thing. They were saying let’s create a world in which everyone is valued, respected, and can flourish together, now and in the future. I try to make art that valorizes that story and gives us the hope and energy we need to flourish as human beings.
You had a whole career as a groundbreaking legal scholar, retiring from the University of Hawai‘i only three years ago. And in that short time you earned your MFA and emerged as an accomplished printmaker. How is that possible? Did you take art classes earlier in your life?
I took classes as a kid at HoMA, which was then the Honolulu Academy of Arts, and I’ve always been a maker. When I was growing up in Hawai‘i everybody learned to sew. So I sewed all my clothes in high school and would do fashion sketches in my notebook.
I took art classes in college and my teachers, like David Pimentel, said I was good and should major in art. But I thought art wasn’t serious so I majored in political science.
Now I believe art is a dead-serious undertaking—it can take on life and death questions. It can reach people’s hearts. I’ve seen people cry in front of my art, which is a powerful experience.
I had this period where I didn’t have a serious art practice for 40 years. I channeled my maker energy into home improvement projects and kid’s Halloween costumes. When I talked to [UH art professor and fiber and performance artist] Mary Babcock, who is also a second-career artist, she said, “You weren’t making art but your eye never stopped working.” I think that’s true, the artist’s way of absorbing the visual world was always part of my being.
When my kids left for college I had started taking classes. Little by little I built the skill set to where I am now. The UH art department is such an undervalued part of the state ecosystem. They are underfunded—the professors make things happen without the resources they need, pulling off a miracle. I walked into that building without all the skills I needed to produce the kind so art I wanted to produce and I walked out with skills. Charlie Cohan, professor of printmaking who is retiring this year, is an amazing teacher.
The mark-making on your prints is so bold and self-assured, as if you have been doing this for a long time. How do you explain this?
This is what I learned about art. It’s an acquired skill. Not like what Americans believe about math—you’re either good at it or you’re not. In Japan they believe if you’re not good at math you’re not working hard enough, so they make the students work harder, and they have better outcomes in math than in the US. The people who are good at art are good because they practice, they do it all the time. Artists are always drawing. If you practice you get better. I work a long time on my drawings before they become prints. With drawings you can go back, erase, change value. Once the drawing is strong, it gives me confidence. When I cut it into a block from a good drawing, it’s going to be good. Knowing that, my hand gets looser, and the mark-making becomes more fluid.
Did you choose to work in woodcut for its history as a medium used for protest art?
Oh yeah. There’s a long history of political art, statement-making in woodcut. That powerful black and white image cut in bold strokes. The medium fits the message. In fact, [UH political science professor] Kathy Ferguson came and watched me as I cut a block because she is writing, as we speak, a book on the history of wood engraving and woodcuts and relation to anarchist politics. There’s a whole theory of the object that she’s into that she analyzes in conjunction with the anarchist message.
Are there artists in this genre who have inspired you?
Oh yes! The main ones are Kathe Kollwitz, Elizabeth Catlett, and Hiroharu Nii, a radical Japanese printmaker in the 1940s in the Proletarian arts movement, which used art to tell stories about ordinary working people. Inevitably they became anti-war stories. There was a book I needed—when trying to get inspiration you need images—that I couldn’t find on the island and had to get through inter-library loan. It was about a massacre that happened during World War II, and the only reason we know about it is because of these artists’ work. That book, the Hanaoka Monogatari, really helped me see the potential to tell historic stories through woodcuts. That inspired me.
I just found out recently that the Hawai‘i organizers I admired when I was young knew Elizabeth Catlett in Mexico. The ILWU’s union education director, Dave Thompson, had gone there in the early fifties to ask for support for the ILWU’s Hawaii Seven Smith Act defendants, people who were on trial for attempting to overthrow the government when all they were trying to do was organize sugar workers. Catlett was part of a print collective in Mexico that donated prints to sell to fundraise for the Hawaii Seven.
What does it feel like to have your work in the collection of a museum, and have it on view?
I am deeply grateful and thrilled. I’ve been taking friends to lunch at the café so we can stop in. There’s something about seeing it up on the walls. As a kid I spent hours in the galleries. So to see my work on the wall in Gallery 10 is amazing.
Did you have a favorite work back then?
The Guanyin statue has been my favorite since I was a kid. It presents an image of a powerful woman, relaxed and confidant.
TOP BANNER
Artist and legal scholar Mari Matsuda with her prints
Hell No, We Ain’t Moving and The Fishing Committee of the Great Sugar Strike of 1946
, on view through Jan. 4, 2026.
Suggested stories
Film Q+A: Co-directors Kimiko Lawrence-Matsuda and Megan Trufant Tillman
For the first time, HoMA Theater Manager and Programmer Sarah Fang put out an open call for this year’s Honolulu African American Film Festival. From the submissions she put together a great program o…
Interview
Remembering Toshiko Takaezu: Artist Kaili Chun on the influential artist
Artist Kaili Chun shares memories of Toshiko Takaezu—teacher, mentor, and friend—and reflects on her lasting influence on art, clay, and life.
Interview
Aloha ‘oe: Parting words from Halona Norton-Westbrook
May 16 is Halona Norton-Westbrook’s last day as director and CEO of the Honolulu Museum of Art, before she and her husband Jim Tucker and daughter Minerva move to Fort Worth, where she will assume the…
Interview
We have received your application. We will contact you when tickets become available.
Something went wrong. Please call to be put on the waiting list.
Added:
To wishlist