In recognition of his achievements as a painter and teacher, Snowden Hodges will receive the Koa Award from the Koa Art Gallery at a luncheon today at Kapiolani Community College.

An exhibit of new paintings by the artist, “Politically In/Correct,” is on display at the gallery through April 15.

“I put the slash in ‘incorrect’ because it can be taken different ways,” said Hodges, professor emeritus of art at the University of Hawaii.

The show includes a portrait of Honolulu printmaker Dieter Runge posing as a prisoner in Nazi Germany, wearing a period suit with a pink triangle on the lapel, a statement about the discrimination against gays and other groups. “Like the yellow Star of David, triangles of different colors were a method of categorizing people whom the Nazis considered to be their enemies,” Hodges said. “Homosexuals had to wear a pink triangle.”

While perhaps not so obviously, another painting in the show — a bucolic, 6-foot-long canvas depicting 30 naked people on the beach at Waikiki — carries its own message, he said.

“So many people are uncomfortable with public nudity in this country. Here, it’s politically incorrect, but if you go to the Sistine Chapel, you’ll see a lot more nudes on that ceiling than I have in the show,” said the artist, who lived for a year in Italy and has devoted much of his 40-year career to painting realistic figures, using the techniques of the Renaissance and Dutch old masters.

“The beaches in Hawaii would have looked like that until the missionaries came and told them to put some clothes on.”

His work has been widely exhibited, including a 2002 solo show, “Snowden Hodges: Florence and the Labors of Hercules,” at the Honolulu Academy of Art, and he has won awards from the Hawaii State Foundation for Culture and the Arts, Japanese Chamber of Commerce, American Academy of Art in Chicago and elsewhere. The Baltimore native earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in fine arts from the Maryland Institute College of Art. He moved to Hawaii in the 1980s.

“Snowden is a long-standing stalwart for the cause of realism, which has often been out of style,” said David Behlke, director of the Koa Gallery. “He started Atelier Hawaii, an intensive program in classical realism, at Windward Community College.”

Hodges’ show at Koa Gallery provides a stimulating dose of social realism, as well.