Summer Dawn Hortillosa | The Jersey Journal

JERSEY CITY -- Sometimes while exploring our family trees we unearth entire forests -- legacies and histories that despite often being far removed, still touch us today.




Two women are exploring their heritages and the portrayal of their cultures in the latest art exhibitions at New Jersey City University.

Laura Kina's solo show "Blue Hawaii" whisks us away to islands very far from paradise. In her melancholy works, plantation workers slave away under the sun. Instead of palm trees and oceans, there is blueness, longing, faded memories, plain portraits and humble textiles -- red checkered cotton for men laboring in the fields, patchworked kimonos for the women.

These scenes are inspired by tales from Kina's ancestors, Okinawans who came to Hawaii in the early 1900s. During the day, they were someone else's cheap labor. At night, they told spooky stories inspired by the St. Elmo's Fire spotted at nearby plantations which they believed were spirits or ghosts.



When Hawaii became American, so did they, forgetting their mother tongues and slowly assimilating, wearing more American clothes and thinking more American thoughts. Slowly, they lost touch with their family back in Okinawa, Japan.

Kina, a professor at DePaul University, has been researching her family's past in both Hawaii and Okinawa since 2009, finding their own ghost stories--things that have long "disappeared, but are still with us."

More