Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects presents Nana I Ke Kumu,“Pay Attention to the Source,” a recent group of watercolor and pastel paintings by Michele Zalopany. Part native Hawaiian, Zalopany spent her formative years in Detroit and Hawai’i and has used both locations as sources for her work.

In the early 1980s, Zalopany began using found photographs that she discovered in library picture collections, old books, and flea markets. These photographs, made to serve other purposes, e.g. real estate or restaurant documentation, family snapshots, etc., took on additional, often, socio-political meanings. Her large-scale 80s pastel drawing and paintings have a noir-ish quality resulting from the rich, velvety carbon blacks.

Zalopany’s father was part native Hawaiian and her mother was Polish American. Zalopany was born in Detroit in 1955, and in 1959, Zalopany’s father moved them to Hawai’i. After a year, they returned to Detroit, which was deeply racially segregated. Her political awareness was a result of coming of age during this seminal period in Detroit, and where, as a young woman, she hung out with older Wayne State University students, Black Panthers, and other downtown Detroit locals.

Zalopany began accessing the Photography Collection of the Hawai’i State Archives, in the search for the earliest ethnographic photographs of Hawaiian women, before miscegenation and the false narrative of the pretty Eurocentric hula girl. Zalopany became immersed in the confluence of 19th century colonialism, Darwinism, ethnography and photography and it’s use for political and economic gain. While she was seeking to understand the roots of her own family, the parallels of the plight of black people and Hawaiians revealed themselves. The artist states, “I’m hoping that by putting more images of an older Hawaiian reality out into the world, I may provoke interest in the true history of the Hawaiian people and their land, and thus chip away at the false narrative that overwhelms most peoples’ current perception.”

Michele Zalopany’s photo-based work is included in over twenty-five permanent international collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Eli Broad Collection, the USB collection, the Walker Art Center, the Carnegie Institute, and others. She has been a guest lecturer at the American Academy in Rome, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Middlebury College, and others. She was a Visiting Lecturer of Visual Arts at Harvard University 2007-2008 & 2009. Since 2001, she has been a professor at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. This is her first solo show with steven harvey fine art projects.

Please contact Lauren Fowler at lauren@shfap.com or call 917-861-7312 for more information or images. View available works on instagram @shfapselections.