Honolulu's museum for the next century - Bishop Museum

It started as one of Hawaii's great love stories and a memorial to a princess. Today, a hundred years later, Honolulu's Bishop Museum is one of the Pacific's oldest and most respected natural and cultural history museums.

This month you can join the Bishop Museum's ongoing centennial celebration with the November 20 opening of a Pacific research exhibition in the dramatic new Castle Building. It's one of many events scheduled for Celebrating a Century of Discovery, an 18-month series of exhibits and programs that will continue through June 1991.

"A building for the next century"

The celebration started last February with the dedication of state-of-the-art Harold Kainalu Long Castle Memorial Building. The museum's first major new exhibition space in nearly 90 years, it almost doubles exhibit space and provides the museum's first (and much needed) flexible area for changing shows.

Contemporary but massive, with round granite columns and an arched window wall, it stands comfortably with the original buildings. "We didn't want to build on traditional concepts," insists Donald Duckworth, the museum's director. "We wanted a building for the next century to welcome and involve visitors in new and changing exhibits."

The November exhibit, Discover!, will fill the Castle Building's first-floor main gallery with prime examples of the museum's hundred-year tradition of sending scientists all over the Pacific to research and collect such things as Hawaiian artifacts, preserved plants that are now extinct, and newly discovered species of insects. Guides will demonstrate techniques used to protect and preserve research collections; workshops (some just for children) and lectures by museum scientists will accompany the show through March 4. Upcoming shows will fill Castle's first two levels, with the second primarily a gallery for hands-on displays, Here, too, will be the Lawrence Newbold Brown Listening Center, where you'll be able to listen to recordings of old Hawaiian chants, tales from history, and stories from early plantation days. It should be open by the end of the year.

From royal warehouse to state museum

To the right as you face Castle Building are the museum's oldest buildings, Richardsonian Romanesque structures of lava stone quarried on the site.

They were built between 1888 and 1903 on the campus of the Kamehameha School for Boys by banker Charles Reed Bishop, husband of Princess Bernice Pauahi, the last member of the Royal Kamehameha family. When his wife died in 1884, her estate went to founding and perpetual maintenance of Kamehameha schools for Hawaiian children. Carrying out a promise made to his wife, Bishop built the museum to house her collection of Hawaiian antiquities.

The three original interconnected museum buildings house permanent collections. The arched tower entrance leads to a magnificent koa wood stairway. Climb the stairway to the Hall of Hawaiian Natural History and to Polynesian Hall.

The gallery to the right of the stairs leads you into Hawaiian Hall, whose coffered ceiling looms above the main floor. Three levels of galleries set off by decorative iron columns and balustrades encircle the space, and the finest of the museum's koa display cabinets are in use. Here you'll find such large objects as the last surviving Hawaiian grass house, a model heiau (temple), feather capes and images, and early surfboards.

"The original concept was based on the 19th-century European idea of a trophy house of artifacts," notes Duckworth. For years, native Hawaiians felt the museum was a private place that had all their stuff and wouldn't let them see it. We've been making a real effort to encourage community involvement, and we're starting to get some results."

More than stones and bones

One major success has been Atherton Halau, an open-sided Polynesian long-house built in 1980. Here, local people striving to preserve traditional Hawaiian arts, crafts, and culture can work on projects and teach classes.

Visit Atherton Halau weekdays at 1 for a half-hour hula show. Between 9 and 3, watch instructors and their students stitching quilts on Mondays and Fridays, stringing flower leis on Tuesdays and Saturdays, weaving lauhala on Wednesdays, and making feather leis on Thursdays. You can join individual classes for the cost of materials and a $5 fee.

Alongside Atherton on weekends, you'll see craftsmen carving two 65-foot logs into a twin-hulled Polynesian voyaging canoe. When finished in 1992, it will be used to duplicate the sailings of the earliest settlers.

Even noncultural exhibits and programs have a Hawaiian or Pacific regional focus. In the Planetarium, Eyes of Hawaii shows visitors how to view the stars over the Islands. The program will be presented daily at 11 until early March. "Questions"---a partly automated, partly live general course in astronomy will show at 2 Pm. daily, and again at 7 Fridays and Saturdays, through mid-December. Planetarium admission is free with museum admission. Planetarium-only admission is $2.50; free to ages under 6.