Prolific artist Satoru Abe helped build Hawaii’s art community

Satoru Abe, widely recognized as one of the most significant Hawaii-born artists, died Feb. 5 in Honolulu. He was 98.

Alejandra Rojas Silva, curator of European and American art at the Honolulu Museum of Art, remembered Abe as an artist for whom the creative process never stopped.

“His brain was always
creating, always producing. That is a kernel of who he is. He’s 98 and he’s still thinking, ‘Well, what’s the next thing?’ I honestly cannot underestimate his importance within the art of Hawaii,”
Rojas Silva said.

Abe’s association with HoMA, then known as the Honolulu Academy of Arts, began in 1954 when he was one of seven Hawaii-resident Asian American modernist artists, known collectively as Metcalf Chateau, whose work was exhibited there. Seventy years later, he collaborated with Rojas Silva and Tyler Cann, HoMA senior curator of modern and contemporary art, on the museum’s 2024 exhibition “Home of the Tigers: Mc­Kinley High and Modern Art,” which included his work, and then on the current HoMA exhibition,
“Satoru Abe: Reaching for the Sun,” a retrospective that looks back at seven
decades of his art.

“‘Home of the Tigers’
had a lot of artists from Mc­Kinley High, and when we were researching that show, we were having interactions with Satoru, he was filling us in on some of the information that we needed in order to be able to produce the show,” Rojas Silva said.
“Tyler and I became really aware that it was time to give him a good retrospective. We wanted to celebrate him during his lifetime, so that he would feel the love and the appreciation that this community has for him.”

She added that Abe was still working on new art as the retrospective show was being installed.

“It’s like the day we opened the retrospective, he was asking me where we were going to put the works he had produced that week — (asking that on) the day we’re opening!”

“Satoru Abe: Reaching
for the Sun” runs through July 20.

As recently as 2024, The Art Gallery at the University of Hawaii at Manoa featured the exhibit “Satoru Abe: 100 New Paintings,” displaying a selection from the 318 paintings he had produced since 2019.

Born in Moiliili in 1926, Abe was one of five children of Japanese immigrant parents, Kuhachi and Toyo Abe. He discovered art while attending McKinley High School and in 1948 spent the summer at the California Academy of Fine Arts, then moved to New York to attend the Art Students League.

In 1949, he met and later married fellow Art Students League student Ruth Tanji of Wahiawa. In 1950, he returned to Honolulu, where he met his mentor, Isami Doi, and fellow artists Bumpei Akaji, Robert Ochikubo, Jerry Okimoto and Tadashi Sato.

According to a biography accompanying his recent UH exhibit, the group began to exhibit
at Gima’s Art Gallery. Abe learned welding with Akaji, created his first sculpture and participated in a three-person exhibition at the Honolulu Academy of Art. From 1953 to 1955, he developed his first body of work, known as the “white paintings,” and continued to exhibit at Gima’s and Metcalf Chateau, a house he rented on Metcalf Street with Akaji and other Asian American artists.

Abe returned to New York City in 1956 and began a long-term association with Sculpture Center on Long
Island, where he held four solo exhibitions. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1963, and in 1970, a National Endowment for the Arts Artist-in-residence grant brought him back to Hawaii.

In the years that followed, he was named a Living Treasure by the Honpa Honwanji Betsuin in 1984 and was honored by the Hawai‘i Arts Alliance, the Honolulu Japanese Chamber of Commerce and the Japanese Cultural Center of Hawai‘i.

In 1998, The Contemporary Museum commemorated his 50th anniversary in the arts with “Satoru Abe: A Retrospective 1948-1998,” which was presented in the Makiki Heights museum’s five main galleries and also in the Contemporary Museum at First Hawaiian Center in downtown Honolulu.

Abe’s public sculptures, many commissioned by the State Foundation on Culture and the Arts, can be seen throughout the islands.

In addition to his work as an artist and sculptor, Abe contributed to the arts in Hawaii by mentoring younger artists. One of them was John Koga, who met Abe through a fortunate accident. Koga’s wife was working with Abe’s daughter, Gail Goto. When Goto learned that her friend’s husband was studying art, she invited them to meet her father.

“I’ve been blessed with having Satoru as part of my life journey here, and certainly his gift of sharing and connecting all the other artists — Tadashi Sato, Bumpei Akaji, Harry Tsuchidana and Robert Kobayashi from New York,” Koga said, calling from his home on the Big
Island. “It was all this crazy interconnection of this generation of incredible artists that really set the foundation for a lot of us artists now in Hawaii. It’s a very short art history, if you really think about it, in time, and to have had incredible quality time with them was just a gift beyond (measure).

“For a lack of a better term, he really did take me under his wing and just shared, and continued to share. He was so generous, not just to myself, but to so many young artists and collectors. He was helping to build the art community,
single-handedly, in a way, you know, and I got to be a part of it and witness it and see it all grow.”

In addition to his daughter, Abe is survived by his grandsons, Donovan and Dylan Goto.

Funeral observances are pending.