Dance Scene
Artworks and artisans part of Prince Lot hula fest

By Vicki Viotti
Advertiser Staff Writer

"Hanau 'ia" (2000), made of lauhala by Marques Marzan, will be part of the art exhibit at the Prince Lot Hula Festival. Shuzo Uemoto

The University of Hawai'i art teacher, fresh from an exhibition that opened the new wing at the Honolulu Academy of Arts, found the annual Prince Lot Hula Festival an ideal venue for celebrating Native Hawaiian fine arts.

So while dancers perform Saturday on the Moanalua Gardens' traditional-style hula mound, a half-dozen fine artists to be gathered in the gardens' historic Chinese Hall have found ways to complement the old in innovative ways.

Andrade, for example, has transformed velvet with silkscreening and stamps, removing some of the pile to emboss designs derived from kapa motifs and plant specimens.

She assembled other works with some kinship to hula. Her weaving student Marques Marzan, for example, used lauhala, loulu and makaloa to create busts and other body forms displayed as wall pieces.

Painter Page Chang, the lone featured artist in the festival's first art display last year, has returned. Calvin Hoe will bring ipu and nose flute works. As for Ipo Nihipali, the feathers of the birds in her paintings were materials in the hula adornments of old.

PuaHinano Campton is bringing watercolors of Hawaiian flora and fauna and plans to continue painting small works during the exhibition.

Campton just returned from a gathering of native artists in Olympia, Wash.

"What's exciting for us is I've realized we've showed nationally and internationally more," Campton said. "Maybe that's typical: We take our local artists for granted."

The Prince Lot exhibition, she said, is an opportunity to reverse that trend.

24th annual Prince Lot Hula Festival

8:30 a.m.-3 p.m. Saturday

Moanalua Gardens

Featuring the 2nd annual Native Hawaiian Artists' Exhibit, Chinese Hall

Free Parking and free trolley service provided from Tripler Army Medical Center lower parking lot

839-5334