Miyamoto’s LIFT Project, Weaving Angels, will be an immersive installation combining relief and screen prints with carved wood blocks, and locally harvested lauhala (leaf) woven into the prints. The prints will feature hula hand gestures of Kānaka Maoli living away from Hawai`i, as a symbol of community, cultural survival, and resistance against assimilation. Furthermore, the Project will reclaim the traditional practice of Hawaiian weaving, ulana, and bring it into Miyamoto’s contemporary art practice. She will share the work through artist talks, panel discussions, and weaving workshops, and will exhibit it in the Pacific Northwest and Hawai’i.

DISplace shines light on the widely unknown connection between Hawaiʻi, the Pacific Northwest, and the communities that continue to flow between these two regions. This exhibition is created by Five Oaks Museum 2020-21 Guest Curators Kanani Miyamoto (she/her) and Lehuauakea (they/them), with historical research and text by Lehuauakea. The Guest Curators are themselves a part of this living history: both are mixed-Native Hawaiian, have family roots in Hawaiʻi and are now based in Portland, OR.

Ka Lipo, the installation at King Street Station for yəhaw̓, was inspired by the Kumu Lipo, the Hawai’ian creation chant. I feel that the one thing so important to Indigenous people is our connection to the natural world and our interdependence. The Hawai’ian creation story begins with the connection between sky father and earth mother, giving birth to all life. We are all relatives.

While We Are Here brings together the uniquely varied responses of five artists whose life paths brought them through the Pacific Northwest at some point in their life – Angelica Trimble-Yanu, Joseph Rodriguez, Kanani Miyamoto, Matt Perez, and Palmarin Merges. In the midst of a global pandemic and shelter-in-place orders, these artists persevered in finding a way to continue their respective art practices whether through utilizing household materials, reusing previous footage, seeing the world as their studio, and more. One of the featured artists, Palmarin Merges, states it well when she writes that she adapted “restriction as a generative force for creation.”