Anna Rice Cooke, daughter of early American missionaries, donated her home and her art collection in 1927 to create the Honolulu Museum of Art you see here, one of the finest art museums in the Pacific. The museum was founded by Anna Rice Cooke, the daughter of early American missionaries, who donated her home and her personal art collection to create a public museum in 1927. Cooke's vision was explicitly to create a space that honored both the Western artistic traditions she had grown up with and the Asian artistic traditions that surrounded her in Hawaii — a place where Chinese ceramics, Japanese prints, and European Old Masters could exist in equal dignity.
The building she commissioned is a series of interconnected pavilions built around a series of open-air courtyards in a style that consciously blends Mediterranean and Asian architectural elements, reflecting that same aspiration toward cultural synthesis. James Michener, the author of 'Hawaii,' donated his extensive collection of Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints to the museum, and today it houses one of the world's finest collections of these prints. Walking through the museum's galleries, you move between cultures and centuries in a way that mirrors the experience of Honolulu itself — a city that has always been a meeting place of worlds.