Honolulu Museum of Art in Hawaii, USA

The Honolulu Museum of Art is an art museum on South Beretania Street in Honolulu, Hawaiʻi. Its permanent collection contains approximately 55,000 works, ranging across Asian art, European and American painting, works on paper, textiles, modern and contemporary art, and artistic traditions from Hawaiʻi, the Pacific, Africa and the Americas.

From the Honolulu Academy of Arts to HoMA

The institution began as the Honolulu Academy of Arts. It was chartered in 1922 and opened to the public on April 8, 1927. Its founder, Anna Rice Cooke, had assembled an art collection at her family home on Beretania Street and wanted to establish a permanent visual arts museum for Hawaiʻi.

Cooke donated the site of her family home for the museum and provided an endowment. New York architect Bertram Goodhue prepared the original architectural plans. After his death, his colleague Hardie Phillip completed the work. The building incorporated Hawaiian, Chinese and Spanish architectural influences and was designed around courtyards and spaces suited to Honolulu’s climate.

The museum opened with about 875 works. Its physical campus and collection expanded repeatedly during the following decades, adding educational spaces, galleries, a library, an art school, a theater and visitor facilities.

A major institutional change took place in 2011 when The Contemporary Museum transferred its collection and assets to the Honolulu Academy of Arts. In 2012, the combined institution adopted the name Honolulu Museum of Art.

What Is in the Collection?

The permanent collection covers many artistic traditions rather than focusing on a single region or period. Asian art has been part of the museum since its earliest years, reflecting Cooke’s interest in creating a collection that spoke to the cultural backgrounds of Hawaiʻi’s communities. The holdings now include art from China, Japan, Korea, India, Southeast Asia, Indonesia and the Philippines.

Japanese Woodblock Prints

Japanese printmaking is one of the museum’s strongest collecting areas. HoMA identifies its holdings of more than 12,400 Japanese woodblock prints as the third-largest collection of its kind in the United States. The collection includes Buddhist prints, Edo-period ukiyo-e, shin hanga and sōsaku hanga.

The James A. Michener Collection, donated to the museum over several decades between 1950 and 1991, forms an important part of these holdings. Works represented in the collection include prints by Utagawa Hiroshige and Katsushika Hokusai. HoMA owns an impression of Hokusai’s Great Wave Off Kanagawa from the series Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji.

European and American Art

The museum holds more than 18,700 objects in its art of the Americas and Europe collection. Areas represented include Italian Renaissance art, French and American Impressionism and 20th-century abstraction.

Among the works in these galleries are Claude Monet’s Water Lilies, Vincent van Gogh’s Wheat Field, Diego Rivera’s The Flower Seller, Mary Cassatt’s The Child’s Caress and James McNeill Whistler’s Arrangement in Black No. 5: Lady Meux. Other artists represented include Henri Matisse, Georgia O’Keeffe, Paul Gauguin and Jacob Lawrence.

Modern, Contemporary and Hawaiʻi-Based Art

Modern and contemporary holdings include roughly 13,500 works across several media. The collection contains work by internationally known artists as well as artists closely connected with Hawaiʻi, including Satoru Abe, Isami Doi, Tadashi Sato, Toshiko Takaezu, Masami Teraoka and Kapulani Landgraf.

The museum also collects art connected directly with Hawaiʻi and the wider Pacific. These works place local artistic practice within the same museum as Asian, European, American and other international collections rather than treating Hawaiʻi as a separate subject outside broader art history.

The Museum Building and Courtyards

The original museum was designed around open-air courtyards and sheltered passageways. Chinese architectural details appear throughout the complex, including glazed tiles collected by Anna Rice Cooke during the 1920s. The Kīnaʻu Courtyard, added in 1931 as the museum’s first expansion, contains masonry screens that allow air and light to pass through the building.

Later additions changed the scale of the institution while retaining the courtyard-based character of the original complex. The campus now combines galleries with education spaces, research facilities, the Honolulu Museum of Art School and the Doris Duke Theatre.

Parking and Visitor Services

Museum parking is located behind the Honolulu Museum of Art School at 1111 Victoria Street. The museum currently lists parking at $3 per hour or $8 for the day, with payment by credit card.

HoMA also provides a free digital museum guide through Bloomberg Connects. The guide includes information about artworks, audio commentary and self-guided tours and is available in 40 languages, including ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin and Tagalog.

The main museum is closed on New Year’s Day, Independence Day, Thanksgiving and Christmas. Admission policies also include several reduced or free-entry programs, so visitors who qualify for resident, student, military or other special rates can check the museum’s official admission page before purchasing a ticket.