Michele Zalopany: HAWAI’I REIMAGINED

 

Carefree South Sea Natives, 2024.
Pastel on canvas,
48 x 36 inches

By dismissing coconut bras, plastic women, and resin-covered leis, Michele Zalopany uncovers the bleak past of her beloved Hawai’i. Her work is as important as it is beautiful.

Zalopany, a Polish American, Ukrainian-Hawaiian painter, is one of the remaining, long-time residents of the Chelsea Hotel. Her unique home, heritage, and wonderful mind have generated an artistic perspective that compels her audience to transform their own.

THE LAB MAG: Tell us a little bit about you? A potted history.

MICHELE ZALOPANY: I was born and raised in Detroit. My father started out as a tool and dye maker and became a UAW International Representative. My mother began as a teacher, then as an executive secretary for various people, including Barney Ales, the sometime VP and President of Motown Records. We lived in a working class neighborhood, surrounded by my mother's Polish side of aunts and uncles. My father is Hawaiian-Ukrainian, and most of his family were in Hawaiʻi.

In 1959, when Hawaiʻi became a state, my father moved the four of us and my mother to Hawaiʻi, hoping that he could get work and we could live there. I have many vivid visual memories; a lot of cousins, outdoor activities, painting outside on easels and just being more in nature.

Waipio, 2015
pastel on canvas
50 x 70 inches

After one year in Hawai’i, we went back to Detroit where my parents’ marriage began to fall apart. My mother left the four of us with my father, went to Miami and became a hostess at a club. He went down to Miami to reconcile and bring her back.  She came back pregnant with twins. They divorced shortly after,  so now we were six children living with our working mother.

My father then married an artist who was much younger than he. She was an abstract painter and was a big influence on me. I tried to copy her abstract paintings when I was about nine or 10.

I went to Cass Technical HS, near Wayne State University in downtown Detroit, where  there were Wayne State students, Black Panthers, and street people, and we'd all hang out at Quickie’s Donut Shop after school. At the same time,  there were anti-Vietnam War protests, and pro-abortion marches that I participated in,  and I started getting more politically informed.

At that time, Detroit was redlined. And I didn't know then what that was, but the banks wouldn't give mortgages to Black families in certain areas of the city. Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote a great article in The Atlantic about this in 2014 called “The Case for Reparations.” It was clear these were neighbourhoods that were destined to fail or good to move into. There was a fear of property values going down if a Black family moved into the neighbourhood, so real estate people would move a Black family into a white neighbourhood and then all the white families would move out, so then they'd sell at a low price. It was so racist.

Line Up, 2006
(triptych) pastel on canvas
88 x 156 inches

I got a scholarship to an art school in Columbus, Ohio. And at age 17, two months before graduation, my mother threw me out of the house because we were fighting all the time. I was individuating. She didn't like that.

I went away to school, which was boring. I knew all the things that they were teaching already and I was poor. I had no money. I couldn't get a job because it was a heavy workload. So I quit. I got a job at a diner and asked this guy that was in school with to marry me.

We got married. I wasn't really ready to leave home,  and he wasn't either. I learned a lot from him, but he was abusive. We moved to New York. He was in a punk band. I learned about the Beat poets and music from him. He told me that I was not an artist, I was a technician. We moved to New York and that's where we split.

While I was resuming my art education at the School Of Visual Arts, I started working for Julian Schnabel. I lived with him at the time when he was in the Venice Biennale and I met all the important people from Europe and I thought, you know, I just have to do great work and I'll be in like him, which didn't pan out. Much later, I realized that he had helped out a lot of male artists, you know, and that was disappointing that he hadn’t really helped me. I have to say that I wasn't brought up to consider myself less than a man, especially by my father.

Police Car, 2006
Pastel on canvas
54¼ x 70 inches

THE LAB MAG: Can you talk about the European years?

MICHELE ZALOPANY: When I left Julian in the early 80s, I sold a small painting he gave me and  went to Europe. One of my last jobs before leaving was at Annina Nosei’s Gallery.  She said, if you need work in Italy, in Rome, call Sandro. I had previously met Sandro Chia in New York. He is an Italian painter and was part of the Transavanguardia. I went to London, I went to Paris – the grand tour – I'd never been to Europe. Then, I ended up in Rome. I needed a job and I called Sandro and he introduced me to Paola Igliori, his girlfriend,  who lived outside of Rome in a village and had a hazelnut farm. As it turns out, a few years later, we became business partners. We started a small press called Inanout Press. We published Rene Ricard, David Robillard, and a bunch of other people. Through her, I met Cy Twombly, his wife, Tatia Franchetti, and son, Alessandro. Through other Italian artists, I had met a whole group of younger Roman artists that were my age group. Sandro gave us his apartment at the Chelsea Hotel, which was our office, and my home. That's how I ended up here.

Being an American in Europe, I felt free of the class system there. I met all these noble people, some were lovely, some were heroin addicts, some had mental health issues; they were just like anyone else.

THE LAB MAG: Was there an awakening, a moment of inspiration that you can single out?

Michele Zalopany: I was around 14 when I thought: I like doing this. Why not be an artist? My stepmother was a painter and my mother was actually a very good artist – she did take drawing and painting classes, but she had a natural talent. It seems  like there's always an artist in every generation in our family. And then I went to the schools that I thought would be the best places to study.

At art school, I experimented with everything… photography, performance, oil painting, drawing and sculpture. At a certain point, I stopped drawing for quite a long time because during that period, it was not cool to draw well.  I questioned myself: Why am I drawing?   I like it too much.   I also concentrated on making sculpture. Later, I decided that I didn't want to make sculpture any more because I didn't want to put objects in the world – it’s just stuff. I never was serious about oil painting. Drawing had more immediate gratification than oil painting and it was more direct. And so I thought I'm going to just do it. Then, there were other artists that were older than me, like Robert Longo and that whole Picture Generation where figurative art came back and I felt freer to investigate my own way of being a figurative artist, my own process.

Cliff Divers, 2025.
Pastel on canvas,
36 x 38 inches

THE LAB MAG: What does form mean to you as an artist?

Michele Zalopany: Form is the entirety of a work. There is always something that's hidden and not everyone's going to get it. It's not like a “Where's Waldo?”  It’s more like there is a lot going on that you don’t know. The paradox is that through the clarity of the work, as it is presented, there is mystery, something is going on that you can’t see in the work.

I'm not fast, I'm slow. I erase, I add, like a sculptor, I think like a sculptor. I realised, sometimes, I have to give up a part of a work that's really great but doesn't work with the whole..

I do consider that classical triangle of the artist, the work of art, and the viewer/participant, and what they bring to a work. I can't try – I've never tried – to make everyone happy or like my stuff at all. I'm hoping, especially with this Hawaiian work, that people will start to see a different sort of perspective of the history of the country of Hawaiʻi, and try to course-correct that narrative of the “tropical paradise,” and the hula girls, and the whole thing.

Horizontal Bathers, 2016.
Pastel on linen.
32 x 72 in

THE LAB MAG: How does your personal history shape the greater story of art and what you're doing?

Michele Zalopany: I don't know about the great picture of art, but I know that the personal is universal. I think storytelling is also universal, in a way. Also, I'm aware that obviously most people that see my work don't have a relationship with Hawaiʻi, or they think of it in a certain way–they’ve never been there, it doesn't mean anything to them. But, I want to share the excitement that I have in discovering, I didn't know a lot of it, the history. 

I'm learning the history of colonialism of the country of Hawaii, and it's terrible, it's just as bad as anything else. My artwork is sort of like these punctuation marks in my developing knowledge about the history of Hawaiʻi and my excitement about uncovering a lot of that.

 

Standing Hula Dancer I, 2022
pastel on canvas
70 x 44 inches

 

THE LAB MAG: Tell us about the series – what you uncovered, the making of it, and what it means to you. 

Michele Zalopany: There's one image of the man sitting in the chair. My whole adult life as an artist, I've used found-images: photographs that were necessarily used for real estate or other purposes. They have served a different purpose, made in a different time of history and have a different intention of the photographer. But, when I take them and then use them to create my own meaning by re-rendering them in a way, that means something to me. I learn about them. 

This particular image is based on an archival photo that I found in the Hawaii state archives. This man is a Hawaiian plantation worker, he’s dressed in a nice white shirt with a necktie, his best clothing. He's got boots on, but you can see he's a worker. Based on my studies of ethnographic photography at the time, he probably was invited by an ethnographer to have hIs photographic portrait taken, a costly and high technology of the time, and to receive a free print. But what he doesn't know is that there's a white towel behind him that is demonstrating how dark his skin is, in order to be rated hierarchically on a fictional human scale; the lightest skin color being the closest to civilized white people. I call it The Towel Test. As an example of internalized racism in America, the brown paper bag test  was used in the early 20th century in African American social spaces to determine who could enter or not.

 

Towel Test, 2021.
Pastel on canvas,
48 x 36 inches

 

THE LAB MAG: Can you talk about how you represent women. In Wahine V, the woman looks unhappy which is a very unusual image when placed against the stereotype that's been trotted out across the world about indigenous Hawaiian women.

Michele Zalopany: I got into this work from being part-Kanaka Maoli. The word Kanaka Maoli means true people and real people referring to the indigenous people of Hawai’i. But, Kanaka was used as the N-word by white haole people. My auntie told me this. She said, “They would call us Kanakas.”

I know the narrative of hula girls as sexual, lascivious, and they've usually got European structured faces, but colorized darker, that's from the tourist industry. I looked for original hula women before they intermixed racially with others–with whites or with any other race.  I went back as far as I could through these ethnographic photos and she was one of them. She has a very classic Hawaiian face and she's not happy. You find images of these women and they're bare-breasted or they're wearing corsets with boots and hula skirts in the studio. It was just propaganda for the tourist industry.

 

Wahine V, 2021
Pastel on canvas
48 x 32 inches

 

THE LAB MAG: Tell us about that very famous pool on Waikiki with all of the swimmers jumping off the diving platform.

Michele Zalopany: The Natatorium was a saltwater swimming pool built out into the ocean from the beach of Waikiki.  Dedicated as a tribute to the 10,000 Hawaiians who served in World War I, on August 24, 1927, on his birthday, Olympic gold medalist Duke Kahanamoku made the first swim there. Now, because they had to use chemicals to clean it and they didn't want the chemicals to go into the ocean and kill the coral and ocean life, they don't know what to do with it. It's crumbling.

 

Natatorium 1, 2025.
Pastel on canvas,
30 x 38 inches

 

THE LAB MAG: When you were putting this series together, creating it, was there anything that you learned that you didn't know?

Michele Zalopany: I've been doing this series since 2005, and I knew almost nothing; up until then, I had only learned about my own family.

I've studied the connections between the ideology of Modernity and archives and further back to The Great Chain Of Being. This gave me new meaning to world history. I learned that human zoos existed and I'm not a historian, so it's familiar to other people that are anthropologists and historians, but this opened up a whole new world for me. And also, to see the connection with contemporary life where you have divisions and nation states created to benefit colonizers, you know, that cause a lot of conflict, and we can see it today in Gaza, in Congo, Sudan,etc., as a result of this imperialism and in using people, devaluing them as less than human to exploit their resources and labor.  I've learned a lot more than I can say actually right now. But for me, it's all new. It was new when I'm learning it. So, it's exciting–that's one of the best things I like about being alive is being able to put things together and go, that makes sense, from something I knew some years ago and what I just learned.

 

Hina HRZ Ku, 2015.
Pastel on canvas.
60 x 48 inches

 

THE LAB MAG: Which painting are you most proud of? 

Michele Zalopany: Recently, one of my father, HRZ, and he's wearing a communion suit. He's the youngest son. He has his dad's tie, probably, dressed in a brother's suit and he has a lei. I had this show at the University of Hawaiʻi in November, which was the homecoming show for me, it was great. He was there, he came back, in a meaningful way to me. My stepmother has his ashes. 

So I brought the painting back and a collector bought the painting. So that was great. She's going to give it to the museum. So that's what I'm proud of.

 

HRZ, 2019
pastel on canvas
68 x 70 inches

 

THE LAB MAG: Do you have a motto that you live by?

Michele Zalopany: My motto in life, in general, is “Anything can be fixed, almost.”

THE LAB MAG:  Is there anything that you want to talk about that we haven't touched on that is close to your heart?

Michele Zalopany: Finally, indigenous and people other than white people are getting recognition. But, I hope I live long to see it all integrated together. I still think women have, I don't wanna be the victim here, but at auction and in sales, prices are not what men have. I just have to keep working, that's all.

All of my work has to do with me learning more about the subjects that are stimulated by my selection of a particular image. My hope is that the beauty of the work seduces the viewer, to see my passion, attention and question my intention. And, that they may ask themselves questions and become interested, too.

More specifically, in this particular body of work, I would like viewers to question the false narrative of Hawai'i as a tropical paradise, that was created by business interests after the decades of the actual erasure of an established culture that had been there for hundreds of years.

Hulihe’e Palace,2015.
Pastel on canvas
36 x 48 inches

Michele Zalopany’s art needs to be witnessed. There is some artwork that translates well from canvas to print or screen, other work needs to be seen. The power is in her mastery of the medium, pastels and watercolour, and the message that pulses beneath. Hidden truths are hiding in plain sight if you care to dig a little deeper.


Moʻokuʻauhau: The Past Before Us,
works by Michele Zalopany
the Picture Theory art gallery, New York

548 W28, Suite 238
New York, NY 10001


ON now until June 21.
 

 

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