Kea Kahoilua-Clebsch is a visual artist from the Island of Hawaiʻi currently based in the Bay Area. Her art practice is grounded in her moʻokūauhau: the genealogical story of the people, land, and elements that birthed her. Through painting, she activates family and historical archives to bring these ancestors into space and vibrant color. These archives range from her motherʻs photo albums to her great-grandmother’s diary entries, from her grandfather’s woven hats to the guava trees he planted on their homestead, from the 125,000 pages of Hawaiian-language newspapers to all 2,101 lines of the Kumulipo. Transforming these sources into richly layered paintings and works on paper, Kea engages intimately with her own genealogy while making space for the depth, complexity, and wisdom of her ancestors often flattened in ethnographic archives. Her work reflects her commitment to being a caretaker of her own history while enriching our visual record of Native Hawaiian sovereignty: how her ancestors lived it and how her community lives it now.
Kea holds a BA in Art Practice with Honors from Stanford University and was a previous fellow at the Stanford Institute for Diversity in the Arts (2023). She has exhibited work in the Bay Area at Batherʻs Library, Kearny Street Workshop, Et. Al. Gallery, SOMAArts, and Stanford Art Galleries, as well as on the Big Island at the Donkey Mill Art Center. She was a recent recipient of the Homebody Fellowship at Maʻs House & BIPOC Art Studio (2026) on the Shinnecock Indian Nation, NY and the Chalk Hill Artist Residency (2026) in Sonoma, CA.
At home on the Big Island, Kea has also assisted in teaching youth art classes at the Donkey Mill Art Center (2024), and helped lead a place-based arts program at Haleki’i Resilience Hub (2020) where she created collaborative murals with students. From 2021 to 2024, Kea worked at the Office of Hawaiian Education as researcher and artist, publishing research on Hawaiian education models and creating artwork for the 2023 Hawai’i State Educational summit. She was the recipient of the Stanford Indigenous Language Revitalization Grant in 2023 and 2024, which helped sustain this work.