by Kāme'o Kahawai
Acrylic on Canvas
24” x 30” x 1.25"
Artist Biography
Kāme’o Kahawai is a Māhū Kanaka 'Oiwi interdisciplinary artist, cultural strategist, and community organizer based in Portland, Oregon. Their work explores themes of ancestry, oceanic memory, queer embodiment, stewardship, and cultural survival through layered visual storytelling rooted in Pasifika worldviews.
Working across acrylic, mixed media, printmaking, paper arts, and textured materials, Kāme’o creates pieces that function as both personal archive and collective remembrance. Their practice often centers the ocean as a living archive — carrying lineage, migration, grief, resilience, and return. Through sculptural surfaces, symbolic motifs, and ceremonial compositions, their work examines how identity is held within the body and inherited across generations.
Outside of the studio, Kāme’o has spent years leading equity-centered community initiatives focused on queer and trans Pacific Islander visibility, cultural preservation, and systems transformation. This intersection of organizing and art deeply informs their creative practice, grounding it in relationality, storytelling, and collective care.
Their recent work has focused on developing visual languages that merge Pasifika symbolism, abstraction, and contemporary mixed media processes to explore what it means to navigate memory, belonging, and survival in the wake of colonization and displacement.
Artist Statement
My work is rooted in the belief that the body carries memory long after language fails. Through mixed media painting and textured surfaces, I explore ancestry, oceanic memory, stewardship, and queer Indigenous embodiment as living archives rather than static histories.
As a Māhū Kanaka 'Oiwi artist, I am deeply interested in the ways colonization disrupts cultural memory while the body, land, and ocean continue to remember. Many of my pieces incorporate symbolic forms connected to navigation, tide patterns, shells, cordage, celestial imagery, and ceremonial gesture. These elements function as both visual language and acts of reclamation.
Texture plays a central role in my practice. I build surfaces slowly — layering acrylic, chalk, mark-making, and sculptural materials to create works that feel weathered, held, and lived within. I want the pieces to feel as though they have survived something. As though they carry residue, lineage, and touch.
Rather than presenting identity as fixed, I approach it as tidal: shifting, relational, and shaped through movement across generations. My work often exists between portraiture and abstraction, between iconography and memory, asking what we inherit, what we protect, and what still calls us home.
by Kāme'o Kahawai
Acrylic on Canvas
24” x 30” x 1.25"
Artist Biography
Kāme’o Kahawai is a Māhū Kanaka 'Oiwi interdisciplinary artist, cultural strategist, and community organizer based in Portland, Oregon. Their work explores themes of ancestry, oceanic memory, queer embodiment, stewardship, and cultural survival through layered visual storytelling rooted in Pasifika worldviews.
Working across acrylic, mixed media, printmaking, paper arts, and textured materials, Kāme’o creates pieces that function as both personal archive and collective remembrance. Their practice often centers the ocean as a living archive — carrying lineage, migration, grief, resilience, and return. Through sculptural surfaces, symbolic motifs, and ceremonial compositions, their work examines how identity is held within the body and inherited across generations.
Outside of the studio, Kāme’o has spent years leading equity-centered community initiatives focused on queer and trans Pacific Islander visibility, cultural preservation, and systems transformation. This intersection of organizing and art deeply informs their creative practice, grounding it in relationality, storytelling, and collective care.
Their recent work has focused on developing visual languages that merge Pasifika symbolism, abstraction, and contemporary mixed media processes to explore what it means to navigate memory, belonging, and survival in the wake of colonization and displacement.
Artist Statement
My work is rooted in the belief that the body carries memory long after language fails. Through mixed media painting and textured surfaces, I explore ancestry, oceanic memory, stewardship, and queer Indigenous embodiment as living archives rather than static histories.
As a Māhū Kanaka 'Oiwi artist, I am deeply interested in the ways colonization disrupts cultural memory while the body, land, and ocean continue to remember. Many of my pieces incorporate symbolic forms connected to navigation, tide patterns, shells, cordage, celestial imagery, and ceremonial gesture. These elements function as both visual language and acts of reclamation.
Texture plays a central role in my practice. I build surfaces slowly — layering acrylic, chalk, mark-making, and sculptural materials to create works that feel weathered, held, and lived within. I want the pieces to feel as though they have survived something. As though they carry residue, lineage, and touch.
Rather than presenting identity as fixed, I approach it as tidal: shifting, relational, and shaped through movement across generations. My work often exists between portraiture and abstraction, between iconography and memory, asking what we inherit, what we protect, and what still calls us home.
