Kea Kahoilua-Clebsch
Kea Kahoilua-Clebsch is a Native Hawaiian visual artist from the Island of Hawaiʻi. Her art practice is grounded in a love for her ancestors and ʻohana, who she gets to honor and know more deeply through her work. Through painting, Kea activates family and historical archives to bring her ancestors and the practices that sustained them into space and vibrant color. Her work reflects a personal reclamation of her mo’okūʻauhau (genealogical story) in a settler-colonial context, where knowing and reciting ones genealogy often requires re-learning — calling out, listening, diving and digging. Painting has enabled this process, allowing an intimate engagement with her own genealogy. As she gathers stories from her grandmother, spends time in the guava fields her grandpa once tended to, paints the hands of her great-grandma she never knew, she reclaims her right to remember while creating space for her familyʻs moʻolelo in historical and visual canons.
Kea is receiving a B.A. in Art Practice with honors from Stanford University. She was a 2026 Artist in Resonance and 2023 Fellow with the Stanford Institute for Diversity in the Arts (IDA), where she made work with a community of artists working at the intersections of art and social justice. She has exhibited her work both at Stanford and across the Bay Area, notable shows including Future Finds at Bathers Library in Oakland (2026), APAture 2024: Return at Kearny Street Workshop in San Francisco, and ArtX x SOMArts Show at SOMArts in San Francisco (2023).
At home on the Big Island, Kea has exhibited work in multiple shows, including ʻĀina Speaks (2023) at Donkey Mill Art Center where she received the Jurors first place award, and Hawai’i Nei (2016) where she received Jurors choice. She also assisted in teaching youth art classes centering Native Hawaiian storytelling at the Donkey Mill Art Center (2024), and helped lead a place-based arts program at Haleki’i Resilience Hub in 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.
Kea is a recent recipient of the Homebody Fellowship at Ma’s House & BIPOC Art Studio on the Shinnecock reservation, NY (2026), as well as the Chalk Hill Artist Residency in Sonoma County, CA (2026.) She lives and continues to make work between the Big Island and the Bay Area.
