Ph.D., Art History, University of California, Los Angeles M.A., Art History, University of California, Los Angeles B.A., Visual Arts, University of California, San Diego
Visual cultures of Oceania; (inter)nationalism; culture contact; colonial cultures; gender studies; historicities; material culture studies; museums, collecting, and exhibitions.
My research focuses on 19th-century visual culture in the Hawaiian Islands—on Native Hawaiian world-making and the fashioning of sovereign futures in colonial contexts. My writings have largely analyzed the ways Hawaiian political and social leaders deployed a range of visual and material culture forms to address heightening colonial pressures, exerted mostly by the US, and to intervene in regional and global geopolitics. I maintain a specific cultural and historical focus due to the intensive archival research required to pursue my scholarly inquiries. Institutional archives of Native Hawaiian visual culture do not readily exist and my work requires studying peripherally-cataloged primary sources in dispersed collections to build an archive. Within Hawaiian visual studies my work addresses issues such as Indigenous, Migrant, and settler visual cultures (19th century–present), collecting and exhibition practices, race, gender, mapping and place-making, and Indigenous historicities and futurities. My approach is interdisciplinary, drawing primarily on visual/spatial/material culture studies, cultural studies, history, anthropology, religious studies, and critical museum and heritage studies.
I aim to push beyond simplified critiques of settler colonialism and often reductive and essentializing identitarian politics by examining image and material fields that complicate binarisms between colonizer and colonized, past and present, here and there. I attend to layered modalities of persistence and coexistence forged through Indigenous visual and material culture. Indigenous engagement with museums, exhibitions, monuments, the built environment, textiles, fashion, and cartography reappropriated and reconfigured the visual idioms of colonial representation while drawing on Indigenous epistemologies.
Professor Kamehiro teaches courses on a variety of issues related to the visual and material cultures of Oceania (Australian and Pacific Islands): Indigenous epistemologies, colonial processes, gender, race and ethnicity, customary arts, contemporary arts, the built environment, heritage studies, and community engagement through the arts.
National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship.
Smarthistory Fellowship—Oceanic Art History, Center for Public Art History.
President’s Research Fellowship in the Humanities. University of California, Office of the President.
Arts Research Institute, Major Project Grants.
Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Mentoring.
Universal Design in Instruction Award, Disability Resource Center and Campus Diversity Office, University of California, Santa Cruz.
Hawai'i Book Publishers Association 2019 Samuel M. Kamakau Award for Hawai`i Book of the Year + Hawai'i Book Publishers Association 2019 Ka Palapala Po'okela Award for Excellence in Hawaiian Language, Culture, and History, for Hoʻoulu Hawaiʻi: The King Kalākaua Era, ed. Healoha Johnston, to which I contributed "Worlding the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi: The Art of International Relations" (Honolulu: Honolulu Museum of Art, 2018).
Hawaiʻ Book Publishers Association 2017 Ka Palapala Poʻokela Award for Excellence in Illustrative or Photographic Books, for Royal Hawaiian Featherwork: Nā Hulu Aliʻi, ed. Leah Caldeira et al., to which I contributed "Featherwork in the Hawaiian Monarchy Period" (Honolulu: University of HawaiÊ»i Press; San Francisco:Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco in collaboration with the Bernice Bishop Museum).
R. L. Shep Ethnic Textiles Book Award for 2015, given annually by the Textile Society of America, for Royal Hawaiian Featherwork: Nā Hulu Aliʻi, ed. Leah Caldeira et al., to which I contributed "Featherwork in the Hawaiian Monarchy Period" (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press; San Francisco: Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco in collaboration with the Bernice Bishop Museum).
Co-curator (with Dr. Ping-Ann Addo), “Cloth and Culture in Oceania: Bark Cloth from Samoa, Tonga, Fiji, and the Marquesas Islands.” UCSC Women’s Center.
Co-director, “Katherine Ng, Book Arts,” Peppers Art Gallery, University of Redlands, Redlands, California
Co-director, “El Nopal: Photomechanical Reproductions by Mexico City and L.A. Artists” (included the work of Daniel J. Martinez, Rubén Ortiz-Torres, John Valadez, Pia Elizondo, John Baldessari, Laureana Toledo, Carlos Somonte, Daniela Rossell, and Francesco Siqueiros), Peppers Art Gallery, University of Redlands, Redlands, California
Co-director, “Image and Text in Asian Art,” Peppers Art Gallery, University of Redlands, Redlands, California
Co-director, “ARTillery art collective” (a Los Angeles-based women’s art collective), Peppers Art Gallery, University of Redlands, Redlands, California
Co-director, “Art As Mediation,” Peppers Art Gallery, University of Redlands, Redlands, California
"Mapping Race or Nation in the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi," Pacific Futurisms session, College Art Association Annual Conference, 2025.
"Worlding the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi: King Kalākaua and the Art of International Relations," Pacific Encounters, Templeton Colloquium in Art History, University of California–Davis, 2023.
"Water as Place and Path in Oceanic Visual Culture," keynote for Under(Water), Boston University, 2022.
"Natural History Collecting in Nineteenth-Century Hawaiʻi," Occidental College, 2018.
"Science, Religion, and Nineteenth-Century Hawaiian Collections," Making Material Histories program series, Williams College, Williamstown, Massachusetts, 2018.
Organizer/convener, "Pacific Island Worlds: Transpacific Dis/Positions—Crosscurrents in Indigenous, Diasporic, and Colonial Histories of Oceania Symposium, UC Santa Cruz, 2018.
"From Trans-Mississippi to Greater America: Hawaiʻi at the Omaha Expositions, 1898-1899," The New and the Novel in the 19th-Century Nineteenth Century Studies Association Conference, 2016.
"Religious Practice, Scientific Inquiry and 19th-Century Hawaiian Collections," Collections in Flux: The Dynamic Spaces and Temporalities of Collecting conference, Clark Library, University of California, Los Angeles. Organized by the UC Multi-campus Research Group "Material Cultures of Knowledge, 1500-1830."
Co-Organizer, "Salt of the Earth: Exploring the Cultural Diasporas of Surfing," Porter Festival and University of California Humanities Research Institute event series, 2013.
"Palaces and Sacred Spaces: ʻIolani Palace, Honolulu, Hawaiʻi." Paul H. and Erika Bourguignon Lecture Series in Art and Anthropology, Ohio State University, 2013.
"Natural Theology, Scientific Inquiry, and Natural and Material Culture Collections in the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi, c. 1830-1890." Pacific Arts Association International Symposium, 2013.
Books and Edited Volumes
Objects of the Nation: Hawaiʻi at the World Fairs, 1855-1899 (in process).
Art and Environment in Oceania, a special issue of Pacific Arts: Journal of the Pacific Arts Association, n.s. vol. 20, no. 1, 2021 (co-edited with Maggie Wander).
"From the Edge Through the Vā: Introduction to Pacific Island Worlds: Oceanic Dis/Positions, Pacific Arts vol. 22, no. 1, 2022 (co-authored with James Clifford).
"Worlding the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi: The Art of International Relations," in Hoʻoulu Hawaiʻi: The King Kalākaua Era, edited by Healoha Johnston. Honolulu: Honolulu Museum of Art, 2018.
"Featherwork in the Hawaiian Monarchy Period, c. 1820–1893," in Royal Hawaiian Featherwork: Nā Hulu Aliʻi, edited by Leah Caldeira, Christina Hellmich, Adrienne L. Kaeppler, Betty Lou Kam, and Roger G. Rose. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press; San Francisco: Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco in collaboration with the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum Press, Honolulu, 2015.
"Documents, Specimens, Portraits: Dumoutier’s Oceanic Casts," in Fiona Pardington: The Pressure of Sunlight Falling, edited by Kriselle Baker and Elizabeth Rankin. Dunedin, New Zealand: Otago University, 2011.
"Hawaiʻi at the World Fairs, 1867–1893," special issue, "Hawaiʻi in World History," edited by Christine Skwiot, History Connected (University of Illinois), Vol. 8, No. 3, 2011.
“Hawaiian Quilts: Chiefly Self-Representations in 19th Century Hawai‘i,” in Pragmatic Creativity and Cultural Hybridity: Textiles in and of the Pacific, ed. Phyllis Herda, Ping-Ann Addo, and Heather Young-Leslie. Special issue of The Journal of the Pacific Arts Association, new series, Vols. 3-5, 2007.
