Artists consider sugar's past and present in exhibit

By Christie Wilson
Neighbor Islands Editor

Honolulu artist Romolo Valencia grew up in a plantation town on Kaua'i, and he now uses new technology in making his art. His mixed-media piece, "Antes y Ahora/Hawaiian Raw," is part of the "Cane Crossings" exhibit. Photos courtesy of Hui No'eau Visual Arts Center 'Cane Crossings: Artists' Perspectives on Sugar in Hawai'i' Featuring works by Maile Andrade, Franco Salmoiraghi, Claire Sanford, Romolo Valencia, Sidney Yee and Carol Yotsuda SaturdayiApril 20 Hui No'eau Visual Arts Center, Makawao, Maui (808) 572-6560

"Cane Crossings" aptly is being staged at the Kaluanui estate, a C.W. Dickey-designed home built for Harry and Ethel Baldwin in 1917 and occupied by Hui No'eau since 1976. Still standing on the Makawao site are remnants of the Kaluanui Mill, which was in operation during the last half of the 19th century.

Harry Baldwin was the son of sugar pioneer Henry Perrine "H.P." Baldwin, co-founder of Alexander & Baldwin. A&B's Hawaiian Commercial & Sugar Co. on Maui, with 38,000 acres, and the much smaller Gay & Robinson plantation on Kaua'i are the only survivors of the Islands' once-great sugar industry.

One of the invited artists for the "Cane Crossings" exhibit is jewelry maker and metal sculptor Claire Sanford, who is the great-great-granddaughter of H.P. Baldwin.

Sanford recently visited A&B's Pa'ia Mill, which closed in 2000, and found inspiration in the aging machinery and industrial structures. The Honolulu-born artist, who now lives in Gloucester, Mass., isolated shapes and patterns from photographs she took of the mill, and translated the designs into brooches, pendants and small objects.

Although her exhibit pieces focus on the mechanical aspects of the mill, Sanford said, the experience also made her realize that the family history she had been given as a child didn't give proper due to the thousands of sugar workers who made the place hum.

"I was really profoundly struck while I was in the mill that (H.P. Baldwin) was just one small person in this incredible matrix of spaces and machines and things that had to work together as a whole," she said. "I had a much stronger appreciation for how the structure of the mill was so reliant on so many people doing so many different things. You couldn't necessarily put all the accolades on one person. It would be nothing if you didn't have all the people who did all these amazing things."

People are what Honolulu artist Romolo Valencia remembers most about his small-kid days in Kilauea town on Kaua'i, where his Filipino immigrant parents worked for the sugar company. "I really had a great childhood in Kilauea. It was really fun. Of all the things I remember from that small little town, a lot had to do with the people," he said.

While staring at a photo of the Kilauea mill that he had positioned on a large piece of plywood for a piece titled "Memories," Valencia grabbed a marker and began writing the names of everyone he could remember from his childhood: parents, grandparents, children, non-Filipino workers, plantation managers.

At the end of two days, he was surprised to find that he had scrawled more than 500 names on the board.

"That little town was a really special place. It's nice to think back about it, but I don't think I could go back to that kind of thing now that I know what I know now. It was a different time," he said.

Lihu'e artist Carol Kouchi Yotsuda was a keen observer of plantation life as the daughter of a Buddhist minister serving congregations in Papa'ikou, Pa'uwela, Hanapepe and elsewhere. She is saddened by sugar's demise and like Valencia, admires the sense of community among camp residents that was fostered by shared hardships.

"I feel that way a lot now, especially whenever I drive over to the west side," she said. "The cane fields are almost all gone. I feel really sad, and I get choked up all the time. Everywhere we went, there were either furrows or green fields or tassels. The whole time I grew up I saw that, and now it's not there."

Yotsuda's ceramic, textile and multimedia works for "Cane Crossings" pay tribute to plantation life and, in particular, to the Japanese women who persevered over their hardscrabble existence.

Her ceramic piece titled "Tanomoshi" commemorates the traditional Japanese institution of rotating credit. Money was collected by groups of women and awarded to one member at a time on a rotating basis.

Times change, but past impressions affect the present: Jewelry maker and metal sculptor Claire Sanford, great-great-granddaughter of sugar pioneer Henry Perrine "H.P." Baldwin, co-founder of Alexander & Baldwin, took a photograph of A&B's Pa'ia Mill, top, then created a brooch from the image, bottom.

"I like the idea of how with limited resources, they would make things work. I really admired the spirit of these women," she said.

Maui artist Sidney Yee, who submitted two diptychs for the exhibit portraying the Pa'ia Mill, did not come from a sugar family, but grew up in Waipahu. "Wherever you went, the mill was looming over you at every point in town, and there was the smell and soot," he said.

He, too, acknowledges a twinge of nostalgia at the passing of sugar, but he is also fascinated by the process of change.

"My work primarily has to do with changing realities. I like to discuss things like how important something is only at that point where it's becoming extinct. It's at that point that we realize how meaningful and important it is and we become nostalgic about it," he said.

"The sugar mill fits that idea for me, where something seems substantial and permanent, but when it's finally at the point where it's not going to be that, you have the realization that change is part of the process of life."

Like the other artists in the "Cane Crossings" exhibit, fiber and textile artist Maile Andrade of Honolulu also expresses sadness at the loss of a way of life. But she grieves not the end of the sugar era, but for what was lost to Hawai'i's native people.

"When I think about the sugar industry in Hawai'i, it speaks of an intrusion of one culture's value system on the native people of this land," Andrade said in a statement for the exhibit. "The result brought a different land-ownership concept, imported and displaced people to work its fields, and changed the dynamics of the population of Hawai'i. It did not practice resource management for the health and betterment of the land and water. If took far more than it gave."

"Cane Crossings" also features the work of photographer Franco Salmoiraghi of Honolulu, a descendant of Italian immigrants who worked in the coal mines of southern Illinois. Salmoiraghi said he found kinship with Hawai'i sugar workers when he arrived in the Islands in 1968. With his camera, he documented the closings of mills on O'ahu, Maui, Kaua'i and the Big Island.