This dissertation constructs a counter-institutional history of contemporary art and visual culture advancing Hawaiian sovereignty from the 1960s into the speculative future. In the decades following Hawai‘i’s US statehood admission in 1959, alongside growing discontent with intensifying capital investment in tourism and further fortification of military infrastructure, there began a resurgent—and still ongoing—Hawaiian cultural renaissance. Scholars and artists alike, though, have long bemoaned the seemingly minimal role of the visual arts in this wake, highlighting the general reluctance of Euro-American-centric fine art institutions in Hawai‘i to neither include Kanaka Maoli artists in exhibitions nor support and uplift Native Hawaiian concerns. While critical art historical scholarship has long addressed this ostracism, I take a different approach toward historicizing contemporary art in Hawai‘i, seeking to challenge the very inclination for institutional inclusion. Instead, this dissertation contends that work produced in an explicitly counter-institutional spirit with antagonistic anti-colonial politics had an immediate impact on cultivating support for Hawai‘i’s self-determination precisely because of its exclusion from Hawai‘i’s hegemonic art institutions. Put differently, early work emerging from non-art contexts importantly did not acquiesce to Euro-American tastes nor seek institutional affirmation, opting to develop and evolve alongside various social concerns and land struggles in Hawai‘i. As I argue, these practices have remained vital foundational touchstones and references for artists working today, forming the foundation of a revolutionary visual culture of national liberation in Hawai‘i that continues to complement, give voice to, and shape the Hawaiian sovereignty movement.

Spanning political print publications, social photography, documentary filmmaking, site-specific sculpture, installations, video work, and digital cartography, among other media, I trace an expansive and ongoing artistic movement in Hawai‘i concerned not with institutional acceptance but, rather, linked through the Indigenous ethical value and radical environmentalism of aloha ‘āina, or “love of the land.” Building upon its existing multiplicity of meanings, I theorize aloha ‘āina as both an artistic medium and method of national liberation in the anti-colonial Marxist tradition, converging as an expression of national culture in Hawai‘i. The dissertation’s four chapters roughly follow a chronological order and demarcate shifts in artistic production over time. Chapter one examines the early documentarian practices of Kokua Hawaii, Ed Greevy, and Nā Maka o ka ‘Āina from the 1960s through 1993. Chapter two compares site-specific works commissioned by Hawai‘i’s arts institutions in the 1970s to ongoing place-based community endeavors begun by Piliāmoʻo and Bernice Akamine in the 1980s and 1990s, respectively. Chapter three assesses work by Drew Kahu‘āina Broderick, Tropic Zine, Jane Chang Mi, Tiare Ribeaux, and others that challenges the interdependent apparatuses of the tourist industry and military occupation in contemporary Hawai‘i. Chapter four analyzes Sean Connelly’s online, sculptural, and socially engaged efforts to recover traditional land management practices, imagining decolonial Hawai‘i futures. This genealogy, in which questions over land have remained the primary motivating factor, proposes an environmental art history of post-statehood Hawai‘i that seeks to become the art history of an independent Hawaiian nation.