Michele Zalopany: HAWAI’I REIMAGINED
Carefree South Sea Natives, 2024. Pastel on canvas. By Michele Zalopany.
By dismissing coconut bras, plastic women, and resin-covered leis, Michele Zalopany presents an unvarnished past that is as important as it is beautiful.
Zalopany, a Ukrainian-Hawaiian painter, is one of the original 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 up in Detroit. My father was a UAW tool and dye maker and my mother was a teacher. 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 four of us and my mother to Hawaiʻi, hoping that he could get work and we could live there. I remember a lot of visual stuff; 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 we went back to Detroit. My mother left my father, went to Miami and became a hostess at a club. He went down to get her and they had reconciliation twins but it didn't work out. So my mother had six children when they got divorced.
My father then married a painter who was much younger. She was an abstract painter and was a big influence on me. I tried to copy her, I was like nine or 10.
I went to Cass Tech, it was near Wayne State University in downtown Detroit. So there were Black Panthers, and street people, and we'd all hang out at the donut shop after school. And there were Vietnam War and pro-abortion marches, and I started getting more politically informed.
And then 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 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 to marry me.
We got married. I wasn't really ready to leave home, a home that I really never had, 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. He told me that I was not an artist, I was a technician. We moved to New York and that's where we split.
Line Up, 2006
(triptych) pastel on canvas
88 x 156 inches
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. He helped a lot of male artists, you know, and I have to say because of my father, I wasn't brought up to consider myself less than a man or a male, so I was kind of surprised by that.
THE LAB MAG: Can you talk about the European years?
MICHELE ZALOPANY: After I left Julian in the early 80s, I went to Europe. Through meeting people working with him, I worked at a gallery. Annina Nosei was the dealer I worked for who said, if you need work in Italy, in Rome, call Sandro. Sandro Chia is an Italian painter and was part of this 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 him and Sandro introduced me to Paola Igliori, his girlfriend who lived outside of Rome in a village and had a hazelnut farm. As it turns out, we became business partners. We started a small press called In and Out Press. We published Rene Ricard, David Robillard, and a bunch of other people. Through her, I met Cy Twombly, and his wife, and that whole group of younger Roman artists that were my age group. And through her and Sandro, I got an apartment at the Chelsea Hotel, which was our office. And then I lived there. That's how I ended up here.
But being in Europe as an American, I felt free of the class system. I met all these noble people, some were heroin addicts, some were, you know, noble.
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 good artist – she didn't take drawing and painting classes – she had a natural talent. It was almost 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 ways to study, then I stopped drawing for a long time because it was not cool.
I had to question: Why am I drawing? I didn't want to make sculpture because I didn't want to put objects in the world – it’s just stuff. 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. By Michele Zalopany.
THE LAB MAG: What does form mean to you as an artist?
Michele Zalopany: Form is like the entirety of the work. There is always something that's hidden and not everyone's going to get it. It's not like a “Where's Waldo?” With my 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 that's really great but doesn't work with the whole. So that's what I use – a painting or drawing; a flat plane.
I'm in that classical triangle of what the viewer brings 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.
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 little punctuation marks in my knowledge about the history of Hawaiʻi and the excitement about uncovering a lot of that.
Horizontal Bathers, 2016. pastel on linen. 32 x 72 in
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 the tie, his best clothing. He's got boots on, but you can see he's a worker. It’s rare to get his photo taken, but what he doesn't know is there's a towel behind him that is showing how dark his skin is. I call it the towel test. Like in America, they had the paper bag test where they tested black people's skin color to see how much black blood they had.
Towel Test, 2021. Pastel on canvas. By Michele Zalopany.
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. By the way, the word Kanaka Maoli means native person. And Kanaka was used as the N-word by white people. My auntie told me this. She said, “They would call us Kanakas.” I mean, that was derogatory.
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 anybody else, Asian people. And, I went back as far as I could through these ethnographic photos and she was one of them. And 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. By Michele Zalopany.
THE LAB MAG: Tell us about that very famous Lido pool with all of the swimmers jumping off the diving platform.
Michele Zalopany: The Natatorium was a World War I monument on the beach of Waikiki that was built as a swimming pool out into the ocean with a panel. And it was a tribute to the 10,000 Hawaiians who served in World War I. When Hawaiʻi was a territory then. 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 all that stuff, they don't know what to do with it. It's crumbling.
Natatorium 1, 2025. Pastel on canvas. By Michele Zalopany.
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 didn't know most of this because I only learned about my own family.
I'd read about archives, but this gave it a whole new meaning. 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, colonial, you know, that cause a lot of trouble and we can see in Gaza, in different disasters right now. 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 five years ago
Hina HRZ Ku, 2015. Pastel on canvas. By Michele Zalopany.
THE LAB MAG: Which painting are you most proud of?
Michele Zalopany: Recently, the one of my father, HRZ, and he's wearing a communion suit. He's the youngest son. He had his dad's tie, probably, dressed in a brother's suit and he has a lei. And 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 – his wife had 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 kind of 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: I think 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 again, but at auction, 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. By Michele Zalopany.
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.
very laboratory