Kites: celebrations, play, triumphs, contests, measurers of distance, signaling in peace and in battle. Kites are a part of a myriad of cultures, with depictions in cave paintings more than ten millennia old. Kites are the art of their fabric and the graceful grid of their frames. I think of movement and of hope and of trying again. I can take a square and pull one corner out and suddenly have a shape that is capable of soaring, aloft on the wind, glinting nearer and farther, an ever-changing image.

We each have our own associations with kites, but for me these kites are a portrait of Pat Hammond, an 84-year-old dear friend who is a kite maker and collector. Nearly 25 years ago, she visited the non-profit I founded to help lift young people out of poverty in New York City, The TEAK Fellowship. She taught our students to make their own kites in order to help those children feel they could soar. Today some of those students are Fulbright Scholars, lawyers, educators, doctors, and engineers. I know they will never forget the whimsical time they spent creating kites with Pat. This body of work is tribute to her.

The sturdy grid of the kite creates order: a frame to show treasures and contain images that are richer and stronger together. The fabric of seven of these kites is created with photographs of mine; the other six are created with photos taken by Pat and her husband Hal when they lived in Hawaii for one year in 1959, when Hawaii became the 50th state in the United States of America. She photographed the same places that I inhabit now. For most of my life, I have made a practice of taking photographs every day. These images are from Pat’s and my daily lives, separated in time: the pineapple fabric of my dress, the Sun Yat-Sen statue at ‘Iolani School, Doris Duke’s collection of Islamic mosaic tiles, a purple turnip, Birds of Paradise, Diamond Head, a temple, an oversized sapphire stone in an Ala Moana jewelry shop, a glass-bottomed Kaka’ako swimming pool suspended like a kite, high up in an apartment building.

None of the kites mix our photos because they are taken from different times. We all long to transcend time, but we can’t: even though the startling power of photography is its capacity to still time, photographs inevitably reveal their era. The images from the 50s look different; we would not be mistaken for people from the 1950s and they would not be mistaken for us, because of changes in style and habit and because of the progress of photographic technology. Even photos of the same yellow Hibiscus blooms look different because the tones of the old photographs are simpler and so those images are defined by shape, whereas in contemporary images the eye is drawn to the explosion of color. The nature of the possibility of beauty has shifted.

This show is designed to share the experience of Hawaii through time with its manifold cultures united within a framework of life-altering beauty.