The New Pacific Gallery at the Bishop Museum 72 After having been closed for three years, the newly renovated Pacific Hall at the Bishop Museum in Honolulu, Hawai‘i, reopened on September 21, 2013, with a day-long celebration featuring traditional music and dance, lectures, films, and, of course, the presentation of a remarkable collection of art from around the Pacific. This marked the newest phase in the life of a museum gallery of world importance that has been open for nearly 110 years and whose collection and presentation methodology has steadily grown and evolved. The Bishop Museum The Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum was founded in 1889 by transplanted New Yorker Charles Reed Bishop in honor of his late wife, Bernice Pauahi Bishop (1831– 1884), the great-granddaughter and final heir of Hawaiian King Kamehameha I (fig. 1). The museum’s original collection was based largely on the royal family heirlooms of the Kamehameha and Kalakaua dynasties (which will be the subject of a future article). It has since developed into the world’s largest and most comprehensive collection of Pacific cultural artifacts and scientific specimens. The museum’s holdings feature art and anthropological materials dating from pre-contact times to the present, personal and state memorabilia of Hawaiian royalty, and manuscripts, documents, photographic images, and sound recordings of music and oral history. In recent years, the museum has been making a concerted effort to ART on view FIGS. 2, 3 & 4: Main entrance and Hawaiian Hall at the Bishop Museum and interior of the Hawaiian Hall (below). Photos courtesy of the Bishop Museum. FIG. 1: Charles Reed Bishop and Bernice Pauahi Bishop, San Francisco, September 1876. Photo courtesy of the Bishop Museum. By Jonathan Fogel make its cultural artifacts, archival drawings, historical photographs, and audio and video archives available online, although this is an ongoing project that still has a ways to go. Today the Bishop Museum is the largest museum in the state of Hawai‘i and tells the full story of the region in relationship to its place in the Pacific and the world. More than a visitor destination where people from around the world learn about Hawai‘i’s multicultural and diverse communities, it is also a place where local families learn about their island heritage. Indeed, serving and representing the interests of Native Hawaiians is a primary purpose of the museum. Princess Bernice Pauahi Paki, daughter of High Chief Abner Paki and High Chieftess Laura Konia, and greatgranddaughter of Kamehameha the Great, was married to Charles Reed Bishop of Glen Falls, New York, in 1850.
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