The Crater of Maui
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Object number0716
TitleThe Crater of Maui
CreatorReuben Tam
Descriptionoil on canvas
Date1974
SubjectMaui, landscape, Hawaii Island, Volcano
Material110-oil painting
Dimensions
Image: 43 1/2 x 41 1/2
Overall: 44 x 42
Overall: 44 x 42
Acquired from(New York--July 2, 1974)
Credit lineState Foundation on Culture and the Arts, Art in Public Places Collection
Accompanying textAfter living in New York City and Monhegan, Maine as a painter and teacher for forty years, Reuben Tam (1916-1991) returned to his birthplace, Kapaa, Kauai. He earned his degree from the University of Hawaii, 1937 and did graduate work at Columbia University and the New York School for Social Research. Tam was a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, 1948, and an American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award in Art, 1978. Celebrated as one of Hawaii's finest abstract landscape painters, he was also an accomplished poet. His paintings portray the vastness and force of nature, "a sense of geologic time-an awareness of land as dynamic presence, ephemeral entity, omnipotent, mystical, and beautiful."