Pavilion Café Information

To create relevant and transformative experiences through the study, preservation, presentation and creation of art. To present our audiences with relevant programs, exhibitions and events from within facilities that support and enhance their experiences The Honolulu Academy of Arts was chartered in 1922 and opened to the public on April 8, 1927. It was the vision of Anna Rice Cooke, a woman born into a prominent missionary family on Oahu in 1853. Growing up in a home that appreciated the arts, she went on to marry Charles Montague Cooke, also of a prominent missionary family, and the two settled in Honolulu. In 1882, they built a home on Beretania Street, on the site that would become home to the museum. As Charles Cooke prospered, he and his wife began to assemble an art collection, starting with parlor pieces from the shop of furniture maker Yuen Kwock Fong Inn who had ceramics and textile pieces sent from his brother in China. Fong Inn eventually became one of Honolulus leading art importers. When the Cookes art collection outgrew their home and the Cooke Art Gallery at Punahou School, Anna Rice Cooke decided to create Hawaiis first visual arts museum, which would reflect the islands multicultural make-up, for the children of Hawaii. In 1920, she and her daughter Alice (Mrs. Phillip Spalding), her daughter-in-law Dagmar (Mrs. Richard 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 Hawaii in 1922. The Cookes donated their Beretania Street land for the museum, along with an endowment of $25,000, and the family home was torn down to make way for the new institution. 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 museums architectural style, which incorporates Hawaiian, Chinese, and Spanish influences, has been ...