The Art of Collaboration
At HuiPress, Paul Mullowney helps artists create cutting-edge work using ancient techniques.
Rita Goldman
Photography by Jason Moore | Tony Novak-Clifford | Cecilia Fernández
There’s an old coach house on the circular drive that leads to the front door of Kaluanui, the Upcountry mansion designed in 1917 by renowned Hawai‘i architect C.W. Dickey. The home belonged to plantation owner Harry Baldwin and his wife, Ethel, a doyenne of Maui society. You can almost picture the horse-drawn carriages, and later the tin lizzies, that would have emerged from behind the coach house’s weathered wooden doors to wait in the shelter of the mansion’s porte cochere for its passengers to sally forth.
Ethel was an amateur artist. In 1934, she and several lady friends established a little club they called Hui No‘eau—“a gathering of skillful hands”—and would meet at Kaluanui to create art. By 1976, Hui No‘eau had grown into a visual arts society open to the larger Maui community. Since then, the nonprofit organization has been preserving the past while looking to the future.
Slip past the coach house’s sliding doors and you’ll meet a man who epitomizes that pull of tradition and promise. Paul Mullowney heads HuiPress, the fine-art print shop that currently occupies the venerable structure. In the two short years of its existence, HuiPress has begun to put its parent organization on the national map.
Mullowney creates large-scale woodblock prints: edgy, figurative work that he’s shown in Japan and on the U.S. Mainland. But ask him to talk about his art, and the master printer invariably brings the conversation back around to HuiPress. No false modesty here; the work that sustains him is collaboration with some of the most significant artists in the country, names like Judy Pfaff, Robert Kushner, Sally French, Joyce Kozloff and Lothar Osterburg.
