Hawaii Walls 2023 brightening up Kalihi and Palama

HONOLULU (KHON2) – For about a decade, mural art has been growing within Kakaako. Beautiful pieces that share our stories and continue to do so.

Oahu is seeing that expand outside of Kakaako and more within the Kalihi and Palama areas. 

So, to find out more about this, KHON2 News spoke with Kamehameha Schools Senior Asset Manager Bobbie Lau. 

The Dillingham Plaza falls within Kapalama Kai which is Kamehameha Schools, and this is where many different murals are going up throughout this week. 

“Well, we are super excited. Let me just start there,” said Lau.

Lau continued:

“Kamehameha Schools has a long-lasting relationship with Jasper Wong, and his Worldwide Walls group. And what this does for us, it helps us see the vision for this area, right? And it does it in two ways that are super important. It engages with the community. Kamaka, I have been here all afternoon and you just watch people as they look what is going up and they get excited, and they want to be here. And the second thing is it allows us to start doing what we want to do in this area.”

KHON2 News asked what is the vision of Kapalama Kai?

“So, just as some background, Kamehameha Schools owns 102 acres of commercial land right in this area and our overall goal is to build the community, to grow the community that is here already,” said Lau. “To do inclusivity, innovation, and one of our highlights is food systems and creative industries like this.”

“So, it bringing art, in this fashion, mural art and other artists where they can hopefully pursue careers in this field,” Lau continued.

KHON2 then spoke with the founder of Hawaii Walls, Jasper Wong, and asked how many murals total are they planning to paint this week.

“We are doing over 70 murals around Kalihi and Palama,” said Wong.

“So, we are doing all of Palama Settlement, there are over 30 in that one location, we are doing Farrington High School, Kalihi Kai Elementary, Kalihi Uka Elementary, and Bishop Museum and Kapalama Kai,” Wong continued.

“Well, what we hope happens is that it helps uplift, it helps to inspire, and it helps to bring people together,” said Wong.

Wong went on to state:

“If you look at some of these properties and you look at these walls, these walls are not alive. They are just there. When you add murals to them, it brings color, it brings vitality, and people stop, and they notice. And as people do that then more people come around and it puts smiles on kids’ faces and it just helps to change an entire community through just a simple act of putting paints on walls. And we are hoping that we can do that the same and we will do 70 in a week and hopefully that adds a lot of beauty and color to this community.”

Again, the event is called, Hawaii Walls 2023. It started on May 8 and lasts through May 15.

For all the information and, again, where the locations of these murals are, click here.