The Honolulu Museum of Art, initially known as the Honolulu Academy of Arts, was chartered in 1922 and opened to the public on April 8, 1927, with a progressive, forward-looking vision: to give the gift of art and art education to Hawai‘i’s diverse, multicultural community. Founder Anna Rice Cooke envisioned a future where art could be a catalyst for greater understanding of ourselves, of one another, and the world around us, making the community of tomorrow even stronger than the present day.
Anna Charlotte Rice was born into a missionary family on O‘ahu in 1853. She went on to marry businessman Charles Montague Cooke, also of a missionary family. In an era when the societal roles and rights of women were limited, Anna Rice Cooke devoted herself to assembling an art collection, raising seven children, and making a home in the family residence on Beretania Street.
Widowed in 1909, Anna Rice Cooke continued on her own path. When the collection outgrew her home and the Cooke Art Gallery at Punahou School, she decided to create Hawai‘i’s first visual arts museum. In 1920, she and her daughter Alice Spalding, her daughter-in-law Dagmar Cooke, and Catharine Cox, an art and drama teacher, began to catalogue and research the collection as a first step.
With little formal training, these women obtained a charter for the museum from the Territory of Hawai‘i in 1922. Anna tore down the family home and donated the land for the museum, along with an endowment of $25,000. They hired New York architect Bertram Goodhue to design the plans. Goodhue died before the project was completed, and his colleague Hardie Phillip finished the job. Over the years, the museum’s architectural style, which incorporates Hawaiian, Chinese, and Spanish influences, has been imitated in many buildings throughout the state.
