Born: 1 December 1949, United States
Died: 14 June 2024
Country most active: United States
Also known as: Bernice Ann Keolamauloaonalani Miyamoto
The following is excerpted from Infinite Women founder Allison Tyra’s book The View from the Hill: Women Who Made Their Mark After 40.
Hawaiian sculptor, glassblower, and installation artist Bernice Akamine, born 1949, began pursuing her artistic career in the 1990s. In addition to an MFA in sculpture and glass from the University of Hawaii, she completed graduate work in natural resource management at Central Washington University. Just as her time as an exchange student in the late ‘90s at California College of the Arts inspired her to think about art as social activism, studying natural resource management would influence her environmentally conscious works, such as her Pololia (2021). During the isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic, she created floating jellyfish from finely crocheted copper wire and glass beads as harbingers of rising ocean temperatures due to climate change—conditions which lead to jellyfish “blooms” and overpopulation.
Like many artists, Akamine connected with her heritage through her art, and like Koolmatrie with her weaving, Akamine became an expert in native Hawaiian artforms and techniques like kapa cloth-making and waiho’olu’u natural plant dyeing. But just as she honored the past and continued traditional practices, she advocated for those in the present and future. “I still make pieces, just to make, for joy. But I always try to balance that with work I feel that is important to give others a voice,” she said in an interview. Her Ku’u One Hanau (1999) utilized Akamine’s background in construction as she built tents out of the Hawaiian flag, speaking to homelessness among native Hawaiians. In 2015, she received a Native Hawaiian Artist Fellowship and created Kalo, a traveling installation of 79 plants created from stone and taro leaves, exhibited in honor of Queen Lili’uokalani, the last monarch of Hawaii. The plants’ petals featured handwritten renditions of each island’s native boundaries, or ahupua’a, on one side, with copies of the hundreds of signed petitions protesting the U.S. annexation of Hawaii on the reverse.
Akamine commented that as an older woman, she had more freedom to work without financial pressures. “I want to make things because they’re important to me,” she said. “Because if I don’t do it, who’s going to do it?”