Ikaika no Kohala: A Community By Jan Wizinowich
W hen the historic Kohala Village HUB’s
(KVH) main building was lost to fire in March 2019, a heart center of the community vanished. A year later Covid hit, disrupting community connections. These dual tragedies inspired folks at KVH to find a way to help the community reenergize and strengthen connections. “The mural was born out of a wish to find ways to reaffirm our connectedness as a community even while the needs of addressing Covid have isolated us,” shared KVH founder, Bennett Dorrance. This latest endeavor is just one of many in Kohala’s history of unified strength in the face of adversity. With the idea of art and story as a heart connection, KVH’s 2020 resident artist, Raven Diaz, and outreach director, Joel Tan, decided on a mural project that would enclose the slab where the KVH main building once stood, becoming a meeting place surrounded by Kohala stories rendered in art.
KeOlaMagazine.com | January - February 2022
Preparing the Ground Starting in May 2020, Joel and Raven began to lay the groundwork. They invited Kanu o ka ‘Āina principal and
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community artist, Kanoa Castro, to join the team and spent two months interviewing kūpuna (elders) and other community members to gather stories and ideas to be featured in the mural. “We wanted to highlight who and what Kohala is during times of challenge, how we respond and what’s important,” explained Raven. Notices inviting ideas for the murals were also posted all around the community which led to three Zoom (online) sessions and many phone conversations. “We kept it broad, asking questions like, ‘What is important for us to know about Kohala?’ If people were born and raised here, we asked about history and traditions; if they had moved here, we asked about their experiences,” explained Joel. These conversations “sparked ideas behind the mural and we turned those ideas, stories, thoughts into visual images,” explained Kanoa. Meanwhile the KVH maintenance crew built the walls around the slab and painted them with yellow primer, creating a canvas ready for Raven and Kanoa to pencil in the stories and by mid-June the panels were ready to come to life. The next step was to lay down a base coat or background. A call out to the community yielded a diverse group of painters
