Honolulu Museum of Art Acquires Major Collection of Hawaiian Modernist Paintings

The Honolulu Museum of Art has acquired a private collection of 47 Hawaiian Modernist paintings spanning the 1920s through 1960s, museum director Halona Hilmer-Lau announced at a gala event Thursday evening.

The collection, valued at over $8 million, includes works by Madge Tennent, Isami Doi, Hon Chew Hee, and other artists who defined Hawaii’s mid-century art movement. It was assembled over four decades by the late Honolulu collector Dr. Edwin Chung and donated to the museum by his family.

“This is a transformational gift,” Hilmer-Lau said. “These artists captured a Hawaii in transition — between tradition and modernity, between isolation and connection to the wider world. Their work is essential to understanding who we are.”

The centerpiece of the collection is Madge Tennent’s monumental 1935 oil painting “Women of Hawaii,” a six-foot canvas depicting three Native Hawaiian women in a style that blends post-Impressionism with the artist’s distinctive volumetric figures. The painting had been in private hands since the 1950s and was unknown to most scholars.

The museum will debut the collection in a dedicated exhibition opening in September, occupying the entire second-floor Asian and Hawaiian galleries. Curator Dr. Lena Park is organizing the show thematically around the artists’ responses to Hawaii’s rapid social changes during the territorial and early statehood periods.

The acquisition significantly strengthens the museum’s holdings in 20th-century Hawaiian art, an area that Hilmer-Lau acknowledged had been underrepresented relative to the institution’s renowned Asian and European collections. The museum also received a $1.2 million endowment from the Chung family to support conservation and scholarly research on the works.