For local artists like Daniel Kauwila Mahi, printmaking is a way to pass on knowledge.
The 30-year-old artist has been creating images of activism and political movements since he was 16. His recent piece focused on antimilitarism and the decolonization of Hawaiʻi.
Mahi is a digital printmaker, which is a newer form of printmaking. He took quotes from newspapers and transferred them onto sugarcane paper, symbolizing the "Big Five," the corporate elite companies that played a part in overthrowing the Hawaiian monarchy.
"Kanaka found so many ways to express their voice in many different types of print culture, but nūpepa (newspaper) is one that we excelled in sharing our moʻolelo (stories) and especially using it as an organizing tool."
Mahi isn't the only printmaker creating art to bring awareness and promote change. Several artists in Hawaiʻi created images through printmaking highlighting racial disparities, police brutality and activism.
Printmaking is an art form in which artists transfer images from a template to a flat surface. It has several techniques, such as woodcut, etching, engraving and lithography. It's an older method of printing newspapers.
The power of printmaking is that it's reproducible, according to Denise Karabinus, an executive director at Honolulu Printmakers.
"It's considered a democratic form of art," Karabinus said.
Printmaking started in Germany in the 1400s. The Gutenberg Press, created by Johannes Gutenberg, used lithography stones — weighing about 120 pounds — to transfer the images onto paper.
That art method was used by Rep. Sonny Ganaden, who has been printmaking for nearly 20 years.
Located in his office at the Capitol is a 4-foot-by-5-foot image of Joseph Kahahawai, a Native Hawaiian boxer who was accused of raping Thalia Massie. Massie's husband and friends murdered him.
Ganaden said he was working with a group of kids in Kalihi who were doing a project when they became interested in Kahahawai's story.
"A lot of the boys gravitated toward this story of, essentially, racism and injustice from nearly a century ago in the city," Ganaden said. "They saw themselves in his experiences and the experiences of his friends. It felt natural to make an image of this."
Ganaden said he doesn't count the hours it took him to create his piece, but it involved several techniques and layering. He said the most challenging part is using four pieces of paper to line it into one big piece.
But the theme of social justice remains the same.
"It's a narrative with a two-dimensional image. You get it all at once," Ganaden said. "So you're hoping that the viewer's eyes move around to different parts of it."
He said many printmakers have dedicated their art to social justice, naming Dietrich Varez and John Charlot.
Printmakers have used the art form to turn simple images into messages to the public.
"Printmaking is the medium of the oppressed and the people that are challenging power structures," said Mari Matsuda, an activist and law professor at the University of Hawaiʻi.
Her art highlighted people who put themselves on the front lines. Her most recent work illustrates the Super Ferry standoff in the early 2000s and a banner she made when Donald Trump was elected president in 2016.
She said the history of the printing press has been tied to protests.
Matsuda said many images have helped people show what they couldn't access without modern technology.
She explained that printmakers in the 1930s and 1940s were part of the proletarian art movement, which opposed fascism worldwide.
For Mahi, printmaking is a way to generate a conversation of social change.
"If we start with the cultural foundation, which is what I've been trying to do in my printmaking — looking at moʻolelo and how they addressed change, and trying to integrate those sayings or those words and those visuals into printmaking — then people can at least have a conversation about who they are without the American government and the colony," he said.
"And people can really get into the hard part about cultural knowledge and passing down cultural knowledge, which is: Who do I want to be tomorrow if I want to be a good ancestor?"
