“Spirits of Pacific Islands and Oceans” with Wayne Levin and Jozuf Hadley opens Thursday at Kahilu Theatre’s Kohala Gallery. ADVERTISING “Spirits of Pacific Islands and Oceans” with Wayne Levin and Jozuf Hadley opens Thursday at Kahilu Theatre’s Kohala Gallery. An
“Spirits of Pacific Islands and Oceans” with Wayne Levin and Jozuf Hadley opens Thursday at Kahilu Theatre’s Kohala Gallery.
An opening reception is 5-7 p.m. Thursday with a preview time starting at 4:30 p.m. for theater members. The exhibition continues through Dec. 21.
Hadley, also known as Bradajo, will be presenting his Pidgin Poetry at 6 p.m. in the Kohala Gallery during the opening reception.
Levin will be giving a free artist talk in the Kohala Gallery at 6 p.m. Dec. 9.
Levin is an acclaimed black and white photographer who’s been shooting the land and oceans since the early 1970s. His images transport the viewer into a domain rarely experienced on Earth.
A Hawaii resident since 1968, he received his bachelor’s degree in fine arts from the San Francisco Art Institute and his master’s degree in fine arts from Pratt Institute in New York. His books and monographs include “Kalaupapa: A Portrait,” documenting the leprosy settlement on Molokai; “Through a Liquid Mirror,” and “Other Oceans,” “Akule,” “Ili Na Hoomanaao o Kalaupapa,” and “Flowing.”
Levin’s photographs were also included in “Kahoolawe: Na Leo o Kanaloa” and have appeared in various publications. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts; the Ohio Arts Council; and the Hawaii State Foundation on Culture and the Arts. His photographs are in also major public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Photographic Art, San Diego; The Maritime Museum, Newport News, Virginia, The Dimbola Museum, United Kingdom, The Datz Museum, South Korea, The National Academy of Sciences, The Honolulu Museum of Art, Honolulu; and the Hawaii State Foundation on Culture and the Arts.
In the mid-1970’s sculptor and poet Hadley, and photographer Levin collaborated on a project combining Levin’s photography with Hadley’s Pidgin Poetry. During this project, the two became good friends, but afterward took separate paths that didn’t cross for 40 years.
Two years ago, they reconnected after joining SOKO, the South Kona Artists Collective. The duo then decided to create an exhibit of their current work, recognizing that their art involved the spirit, or spirits of the Pacific Islands; Hadley’s spirits are terrestrial while Levin’s are of the ocean.
Born and raised on Kauai, Hadley returned to Hawaii in the mid-1960s after attending art college and teaching art at the secondary level on the mainland. Embracing again the natural surroundings of his childhood, Hadley saw a certain antique history in natural objects and old manmade wooden things, that he took great pleasure in arranging in concentrations of likeness to one another. An exhibition of these works led to an MFA in Sculpture at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. After retiring in 2000, Hadley published poetry and lyric short stories in Pidgin under the name Bradajo, an art form he first developed in the late 1960s. And he again began pursuing found objects assemblage sculpture, a body of work now described as “contemporary tribal.”
