Winter ‘25 FEATHER EXHIBITIONS : ART LIBRARY DISPLAY

This winter / spring the Craft in America Center is exhibiting innovative feather-based artworks by Boris Huang, a Taiwanese-Hawaiian featherwork artist and Chris Maynard, a biologist/birder feather artist. Our Education Coordinator, Sam Sermeño, has curated an interactive library display to accompany technically distinct and cross-cultural approaches to feather art. During the exhibition opening, the Center was fortunate to have  both artists present. Maynard gave an in-depth presentation on his work and Huang gave a detailed feather lei demonstration which will be featured in our Craft Video Dictionary, a new learning resource for craft and art techniques across mediums.

Several of the displayed magazines and books highlight long standing featherwork art forms, from Mardi-Gras to Hawaiian lei-hulu art traditions shared by renown matriarchs. This collection explores the dynamism of feather work’s niche art culture, craft techniques, and its deep impact on different regions’ community expression; from the ornately feathered and beaded regalia and parade culture of New Orleans, to several schools of Hawaiian indigenous featherwork traditions, to more contemporary and fiber-cut dimensional feathered installations.

We hope you enjoy browsing this selection of reading materials, and please know that the invitation to browse our library remains open-ended. Thanks to generous book donations and ongoing curatorial scholarship, our library warmly welcomes the curious passerby, armchair art historian, artists & creatives across all mediums and practices.

Royal Hawaiian Featherwork (2015) dives into various museology research, curatorial insight, and cultural critique of what is considered the origin of Hawaiian featherwork among royalty ranging from the 18th to 19th centuries. This book pays homage to the hand-techniques required in constructing these various feather cloaks and adornments. Ample parts of this book share accounts and research about the cultural recognition of fetherwork’s craft and how this featherwork secured Hawaiian chiefs spiritual protection and prosperity for centuries. According to most art historians, few royal feather artworks (known as nā hulu ali‘i) are known to survive outside of various art museum and private collection settings. Viewers will learn much about the surveyed seventy+ rare examples of royal featherwork capes and cloaks (‘ahu’ula), feathered royal staffs (kāhili), helmets (mahiole), feather leis (lei hulu manu), and various feathered deity iconography (akua hulu manu) in paintings and other paperworks. Deeply rooted in cultural significance, this book explore how various featherwork are detailed, along with their recorded historical-social functions; many of these items were central to Indigenous Hawaiian diplomacy, from securing political alliances and agreements, to battlefield armor and regalia, used as their own form of martial currency, to eventual trading and foreign visitor cultural gifts. This dense volume also serves as the catalogue accompanying one of the first Hawaiian featherwork exhibitions on the U.S. mainland, via the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (2015). 

The House Of Dance And Feathers: A Museum By Ronald W Lewis (Rachel Breunlin and Helen Regis, 2009).

This book was published nearly a decade before Ronald W. Lewis, an illustrious New Orleans culture-shaper, passed away. Lewis helped assemble the “House of Dance & Feathers” museum found in New Orleans’ Ninth Ward. Readers will enjoy the museum displays, festival and parade photos, interview excerpts and insider knowledge sourced from the posthumous Lewis himself and close knit communities. This work highlights and honors the different worlds Lewis inhabited, and these communities’ cultural impacts on Black history and New Orleans’ social fabric; recognizing New Orleans’ various Bone Gangs, Parade Krewes, Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs’ continued legacies amidst decades of change.

Feather Lei as an Art (2005) by the late and renown Elder Mary Louise Kaleonahenahe Kekuewa and her daughter Paulette Nohealani Kahalepuna.

The native Hawaiian press Mutual Books released this revised and expanded edition 15 years after the original was self-published by the authors to bring it to a wider audience. Boris Huang’s featherwork mentor– Elder Mary Louise was renown as one of the main Matriarchs of lei hulu feather arts, and various diasporic Hawaiian heritage-arts revival movements. This book generously shares layers of history, cultural insights, spiritual symbology, and technical diagrams and approaches to this traditional art practice. Sharing practical criteria for knowing one’s feathers (hulu manu), to feather preparation stages, to making traditional lei (Wli) or more contemporary Humu Papa lei with feathers, and respectfully storing and preserving these iconic feather adornments and uses.

The Craft Center’s library proudly houses over 2,000 periodicals and decades of various art and craft magazines. Librarian Sam has pulled a handful of articles from Surface Design and American Craft Magazines? featuring featherwork and related cultural art history articles. Readers will enjoy short features about Kate MccGwire’s mind-bending feather installation sculptures (Surface Design, 2014, Jessica Hemmings) to New Orleans contemporary mixed media artists to further explore; such as Charles DuVernay, Pippin Frisbie-Calder, Mapó Kinnord, Seguenon Koné, and the late Sylvester Francis, founder of Backstreet Cultural Museum (American Craft, 2024, Katy Reckdahl and Jennifer Vogel).

The library is open to the public: Tuesday – Saturday, from noon to 6pm.

The Craft in America Center Library proudly houses over 3000 books, exhibition catalogs, and more than 2000 periodicals dedicated to the art of craft and related topics. 

For further Lbrary or Craft in Schools inquiries, please visit our Library page or contact Education Programs and Library Coordinator sam@craftinamerica.org