For Kapulani Landgraf, a professor of art at Windward Community College, who was recently named a Guggenheim Fellow, securing the prestigious grant was years in the works.
“It's something you never expected,” she told Aloha State Daily. “Because the first time I applied — I only applied once before — it was 25 years ago.”
Landgraf was awarded her fellowship for photography. Other fellowships were given in music composition, film/video, poetry, fine arts, physics, engineering, fiction and more.
Since its establishment, the Guggenheim Foundation has granted almost $450 million in fellowships to more than 19,000 individuals, including more than 125 Nobel laureates and winners of the Pulitzer Prize, Fields Medal, Turing Award, Bancroft Prize, and National Book Award, among other awards.
The fellows are able to pursue “scholarship in any field of knowledge and creation in any art form, under the freest possible conditions,” according to the Guggenheim Fellowship program’s website. The amount of the grants vary.
Landgraf’s fellowship will support her project “What Was Taken, What Remains,” which is a body of work that confronts colonial histories and reasserts Hawaiian visual sovereignty. The project will include archival research, photographic interventions, collage and ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi, as well as moʻolelo to reframe dominant narratives.
“It’s basically having the opportunity to go into the archives and do research and look at like archival images and archival text — and usually it comes from a Western point of view — and it was maybe more in the point of kind of just doing the work but not actually doing it with consciousness of what was happening,” she said. “I'm trying to revisit that and retell that story in a different way that people haven't seen.”
Together with photographer Mark Hamasaki under the collective name Piliāmoʻo, she documented the construction of the H-3 freeway and the destruction it left in its path, as well as the water struggle of Waiāhola and the ahupuaʻa of Kailua.
Landgraf’s artwork is included in collections of the Bishop Museum, City and County of Honolulu, Hawaiʻi State Foundation on Culture and the Arts, Kamehameha Schools and locations on the Mainland, such as the Smithsonian American Art Museum and Renwick Gallery in Washington, D.C. Finally, her art is also part of museums in Germany, Australia, and England, among other locations.
She starts her research on the project supported by the Guggenheim Fellowship in July and will have a year to work on it.
“It gives you dedicated time to just concentrate on one project,” she said.
Landgraf is also the director of Gallery ʻIolani, which has a special exhibit about Robert Cazimero on display through Saturday, May 30.
Her books “Nā Wahi Pana o Koʻolau Poko,” published in 1994, and “Nā Wahi Kapu o Maui,” published in 2003, received Ka Palapala Poʻokela awards for excellence in illustrative books. She also published “Ē Luku Wale Ē”, with Hamasaki in 2015, which captures the construction of the controversial H-3.
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Katie Helland can be reached at katie@alohastatedaily.com.
