Looming deadline for Hawai‘i Handweavers’ Hui as it scrambles to find a new space

For decades, local arts and crafts organizations like the Hawai‘i Handweavers’ Hui have had a symbiotic relationship with the ­Honolulu Museum of Art School at the historic Linekona School. Groups such as the Honolulu Printmakers, the Glass Fusion Collective, as well as the Handweavers’ Hui, have been able to store their equipment, hold workshops with visiting artists and hold their annual exhibitions at Linekona, while providing resources for the museum’s educational program.

Now that relationship appears to have come to an end, and it’s left the Handweavers’ Hui in dire straits. The organization, whose members have produced unique, artistic fabrics used in tapestries, clothing and decorations throughout the islands, including two of the most distinctive artworks in the state, is in urgent need of an affordable, comfortable workspace of about 800-1,000 square feet, with air conditioning and water available. The space would need to contain about a dozen floor looms and other related equipment, including a “library” of samples other weavers can use.

“It can be a shared space, but it has to be a usable space as a classroom,” said Pat Steinhoff, president of the Handweavers’ Hui. “We are desperately seeking help from anyone in the community who knows of appropriate spaces.”

The Honolulu Museum of Art says it is renovating the art school and expects to have a broad education program with classes for all, according to an email from Aaron Padilla, director of learning and engagement at the museum. Hui members, however, say they’ve been told otherwise and worry that without a base at the museum, their organization may founder, to the detriment of the organization and to the craft of weaving in the islands in general.

Steinhoff said the museum has told her that it will offer beginning weaving classes on simple, beginner looms, but is concerned that beginners will lose momentum if they can’t continue at the ­museum alongside experienced weavers and on advanced equipment. The group’s looms allow for complicated patterns of up to eight colors, with each color strung into a frame, or harness.

“Older weavers can go in and help with teaching the new weavers,” Steinhoff said. “It’s a very good situation. The people who get interested in it and take the (advanced) classes really are interested in the tremendous capacity that these four- and eight-harness looms have.”

Over the past year, several longtime arts organizations and teachers at the museum school have been told their services were no longer needed. While the printmakers found a new home at 1142 Bethel St. and the Glass ­Fusion Collective has moved into Temple Emanu-El in ­Nuuanu, the Handweavers’ Hui was told only recently that it needs to vacate.

“We were the last to be notified,” Steinhoff said. “For a long time we were holding our breath. We didn’t know what was going to happen. And then finally they told us.”

In his email, the museum’s Padilla said the changes at Linekona are part of a renovation and expansion of the school that will “reshape our ability to deliver high-caliber studio classes and programming for artists of all skill levels.

“The work we are doing now will allow us to think differently about maximizing our efforts to serve the entire community, providing an on-ramp for a broader cross-section of ­audiences to discover the uplifting and restorative power of art and art-making,” he said. “While we will always be supportive of the work that groups do to perpetuate their specific genres of art, we also need to push ourselves to explore all aspects of our spaces, our programs and our partnerships to ensure we’re optimizing our impact in the community.”

Regarding the future of these groups that were forced out of the school, Padilla said, “it’s really exciting to see these groups forge ahead, galvanize their own identity, and develop their new spaces and programs.”

Whether excitement alone will be enough for the Handweavers’ Hui to continue is an open question. Steinhoff admits that the group was getting “an easy ride, for a long time,” but wonders about the future, and whether beginners will migrate to the hui if it’s not based at the museum, especially if it doesn’t find a space for classes and for its looms.

“(The museum’s) plan is that they will offer basic elementary courses to children and adults, but then they will expect that if people want to continue, they will go elsewhere,” Steinhoff said. “We want to be part of that ‘elsewhere,’ if we can manage it.”

With a membership of about 100 and chapters on Oahu and ­Hawaii island, the nonprofit Handweavers’ Hui is one of the older arts and crafts organizations in Hawaii. It was established in 1953, mostly by people affiliated with the University of Hawaii at Manoa, which at the time included weaving in the art department’s curriculum.

“It was very hard to get yarn here then, and so some of those early weavers actually used sewing thread,” said Steinhoff, a retired UH sociology professor who has been involved with the hui since the 1970s. “They made small, very fine tapestries.”

Those works might have been small and delicate, but the most noted tapestries from that era are the massive murals that hang in the Senate and House chambers of the state Capitol. Designed by hui member Ruthadell ­Anderson and woven by a team of 17 over several months, the woven murals were created as individual panels, hung edge to edge, with the fibers at the seams combed together to give the impression that they are all connected into one piece.

“We kept the loom benches warm for about 12 hours or 14 hours a day,” Anderson said in a documentary about the tapestries, “Many Hands Make Light Work.” “(Weavers) would come in the morning and work, and as soon as someone was ready to go, someone else would come in. We had a good crew and we had lots of fun.”

Weaving had its heyday in Hawaii in the ’60s and ’70s, Steinhoff said, when “hippie” culture inspired a back-to-nature, do-it-yourself movement. People began growing their own cotton, spinning their own thread and dying fabrics themselves, she said, practices that many hui members continue today.

The Handweavers’ Hui was then based at Foster ­Botanical Garden, moving to Linekona in about 1990, said Liz Train, a member who has taught weaving and other textile arts at the museum since 2008. The group has been keeping 18 looms there cost-free, sharing a room with the Honolulu Printmakers and other arts groups, paying rent only for special workshops or meetings.

Train believes the arrangement was mutually beneficial for both the museum and the arts groups.

“(The museum) was running the whole (education) program, registering the students and getting all the benefits of the monies that came in,” she said. “The major benefit for us was that we were getting a place to have classes and to continue our organization. As new people would take the classes, we would give them a free membership in the Handweavers’ Hui for a year, and then some of them would continue.”

The classes, which cost about $300 per student, were “very popular” and often had waitlists, said Train, who was paid $35 an hour to teach.

While many hui members have their own looms, they fear that without a large facility they won’t be able to hold classes and workshops. They also worry they’ll lose out on the camaraderie and companionship of working in groups.

“We would attract people who were interested in weaving, and out of that some people would go on to take classes and then some of those people would become seriously interested,” Steinhoff said. “It’s one of those things that you get hooked on.”

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>> For more information, contact the Hawai‘i Handweavers’ Hui at ­hawaiihandweavers.org.