page_title: Herb Kawainui Kāne
section_title: Early career
hierarchical_section_title: Herb Kawainui Kāne / Early career
caption_attribution_description: Herb's Chicago Studio Other information Family Photo
context_page_description: Herbert "Herb" Kawainui Kāne, considered one of the principal figures in the renaissance of Hawaiian culture in the 1970s, was a celebrated artist-historian and author with a special interest in the seafaring traditions of the ancestral peoples of Hawaiʻi. Kāne played a key role in demonstrating that Hawaiian culture arose not from some accidental seeding of Polynesia, but that Hawaiʻi was reachable by voyaging canoes from Tahiti able to make the journey and return. This offered a far more complex notion of the cultures of the Pacific Islands than had previously been accepted. Furthermore, he created vivid imagery of Hawaiian culture prior to contact with Europeans, and especially the period of early European influence, that sparked appreciation of a nearly forgotten traditional life.
context_section_description: Herb had his own Advertising studio on Chicago's Michigan Avenue, which is known as "The Magnificent Mile." He was a very successful Designer/Illustrator/Author. His talents were expansive working with everything from books and magazines, architectural designs, commercial television work for Kelloggs and various companies, and more. Kāne said he found advertising work unsatisfying. “The end came when I won a Jolly Green Giant campaign, and for a year, did drawings and paintings of that big green fairy until I could no longer suffer it.”
  Kāne had been sailing a racing catamaran on Lake Michigan, and had begun researching Hawaiian canoes in the library of the University of Chicago and in the Field Museum of Natural History, where in 1961 the museum had installed one of the most extensive collections of artifacts from Pacific Ocean cultures put on view to that date. Kāne produced a series of 14 paintings of Polynesian canoes in the 1960s, which were purchased in 1969 by the Hawaiʻi State Foundation of Culture and the Arts, then headed by its first director, Alfred Preis, architect of the USS Arizona Memorial in Pearl Harbor, Oahu, Hawaiʻi. Kāne has stated that this purchase made it possible for him to move to Hawaiʻi, where he lived in Honolulu and continued his study of Polynesian voyaging canoes.
caption: Herb at work in his Chicago studio
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