Arts & Culture Fair | TTF 2019

Saturday, 10/26 the Kohala Village Inn & Hub is hosting an all ages Arts & Culture Fair featuring traditional tattoo demonstrations, workshops, food trucks, dancing with live music as well as kapa, lauhala and wood carving demonstrations- fun for the whole family!

The Arts & Culture Fair will also feature a film festival with award-winning screenings throughout the day.

Skindigenous is a series of half-hour documentaries on the art of tattooing as practiced by Indigenous peoples around the world. Each Skindigenous episode dives into a unique Indigenous culture and tattoo artist to discover the tools and techniques–and the symbols and traditions–that shape tattooing art.

The fair is from 9:00am-4:00pm and is completely FREE!

Kohala Village Inn & Hub

55-514 Hawi Rd, Hawi, HI 96719

Hawaiian Master Artist
Keone Nunes of Waianae, Oahu, has made hundreds of tattoos on Native Hawaiians and non – Hawaiians. Yet, as he says, he is not a tattooist. Keone’s cultural practices didn’t initially include tattooing but his life journey took him in that direction. His dedication to the practice has made him instrumental in reviving this Hawaiian art form that was nearly lost.

Cudjuy Patjidres

Taiwanese Master Artist
Cudjuy Patjidres (aka Cudjuy) is an Indigenous Paiwan tattoo artist from the Sapulju Community of Taiwan. At the age of 25, he discovered the nearly extinct hand-tapping tattoo traditions of his people in an old book and started tattooing traditional patterns by machine shortly thereafter. In 2015, he attended the Indigenous Ink Festival in New Zealand and witnessed the magic of hand-tapping first hand, especially the work of Keone Nunes and others. Returning home, Cudjuy began handcrafting his own hand-tapping tools and through painstaking practice, he mastered the use of traditional tools. His inspiring work has resulted in the revival of Paiwan tattooing practices across a new generation of tattoo bearers. As part of its film series, the Hawai’i Tattoo Festival is proud to present a new documentary on Cudjuy entitled Images from My Dreams: The Story of Cudjuy Patjidres produced by the National Taiwan Museum.

Filipino master artist
Lane Wilcken is a scholar, cultural tattoo practitioner, and advocate for the critically endangered practice of "batok" or cultural tattoos of the Philippines. He also has studied other related indigenous traditions of the Philippines and greater Pacific with nearly three decades of research and experience. His mother is from the Philippines and his father is of English and Scandinavian descent. Lane is the author of "Filipino Tattoos Ancient to Modern" -and- "The Forgotten Children of Maui." He is also a contributing writer to "Back from the Crocodile's Belly: Philippine Babaylan Studies and the Struggle for Indigenous Memory" and "Shamanic Transformations: True Stories of the Moment of Awakening," as well as several articles for various magazines and journals.

Tattoo Anthropologist, Photographer, Writer
Dr. Lars Krutak is an anthropologist and curator who has spent the last two decades studying tattoo traditions among 50 Indigenous societies. He is a Research Associate at the Museum of International Folk Art. Krutak hosted the Discovery Channel series Tattoo Hunter, and is the author of five books on body modification. He is senior editor of (2018) Ancient Ink: The Archaeology of Tattooing and author of (2014) Tattoo Traditions of Native North America.

Sarah Whalen Lunn

Alaskan inuit handpoke and skinstitch artist
As an artist of mixed heritage, both Iñupiaq and Caucasian, Sarah feels it is important to facilitate conversation on the social issues facing us. A lot of her personal needs to create art, whether it is traditional tattooing or painting, stems from her own need to work out emotions and heal. As a visual artist, Sarah works with a lot of raw passions, showing the world her perspective and her place in it. It is not always easy to see but it is always a true reﬂection of what she feels.
As a traditional tattoo artist, Sarah works to help reconnect people to culture and reclaim the heritage of cultural tattooing that was diminished as people became colonized. She believes that all art has a chance to open the dialogue necessary for the change we need and this is the art she strives to create.

Dion Kaszas is a tattoo artist, cultural tattoo practitioner, painter, teacher, and scholar of Nlaka'pamux (Interior Salish) heritage. As a professional tattoo artist he can be found working at HFX Tattoo in Halifax, Nova Scotia Canada. He also works in other artistic mediums, including oil, watercolour, graphite, mixed media collage, and video.

Dion's passion for tattooing extends beyond his artistic work into a Masters degree in Indigenous Studies at the University of British Columbia Okanagan in Kelowna, British Columbia. His area of research is Indigenous tattooing, focusing keenly on the revival of Indigenous peoples tattooing practices, using Indigenous and Creative research methodologies.

With artists Jordan Bennett (Mi’kmaq) and Amy Malbeuf (Métis), Dion started the Earthline Tattoo Collective in 2015 which aims to enhance, expand, and support the work of traditional and cultural Indigenous tattoo practices across Canada.

His work has been featured in Spiritual Skin: Magical Tattoos and Scarification, Tattoo Traditions of Native North America: Ancient and Contemporary Expressions of Identity, The World Atlas of Tattoo, and highlighted in Newspaper articles from the New Zealand Herald to the CBC. He has exhibited in several exhibitions in Kelowna, Ottawa. In 2015 Dion was a visiting artist in residence at the Pedagogy of Place-As Principal Element of Indigenous Art at UBC Okanagan. In 2018, he was featured in Skindigenous, a 13-part documentary series produced in association with APTN exploring Indigenous tattooing traditions around the world.

Julia Mage'au Gray

Julia Mage'au Gray, has been marking skin since 2013 and transitioned into this art form after many years as dance practitioner, choreographer and director of Sunameke Productions.
 It was her role of film maker of the Sunameke Productions three part documentary; Tep Tok : Reading Between Our Lines, and the journey to raise awareness for the dying art form of marking skin in Papua New Guinea that moved her into a new role of ‘tattoo artist’.  She uses the 'Hand Poke' and "Hand Tap" method of tattooing and was taught by a number of Pasifika Tattoo Artists namely Tihoti Mataura, Pat Morrow and Croc Tatau.