Fort Worth to Maui
A Texas girl with an island archive
She carried North Texas light into museum rooms, high desert studios, Chicago classrooms, and Maui community life. What stayed constant was the eye: generous, exacting, alert to color, memory, labor, humor, and the small handmade evidence that turns a place into home.
A life in motion
Childhood
Fort Worth, Texas
Born and raised in North Texas — early love of art, color, big open skies, and the kind of front-porch storytelling that travels with her everywhere.
Young adulthood
Minneapolis, Minnesota
A northern-cities chapter — cold winters, museums, music, and the first real taste of a life built around culture, curiosity, and community.
Early Maui years
Maui, Hawaiʻi
First arrival on the island that would become home. Salt air, plumeria, and a slow-growing sense that Hawaiʻi was a long conversation she wanted to be part of.
Degree
New Mexico — Taos & Albuquerque
Months in the high desert — adobe walls, lowriders, Indigenous art, and the cultural mosaic of the Southwest. Where she sharpened her eye for the way communities make beauty out of everyday life.
Degree
Chicago — School of the Art Institute
Studied in one of the country's great art cities. Thesis: lowrider culture as a serious visual art form — paint, chrome, ritual, identity.
Now
Maui, Hawaiʻi
Director of the Alexander & Baldwin Sugar Museum. Mom to Pepper. Sister to Amanda. Stewarding Maui's plantation-era memory while still making new work, new trips, and new family every year.
From the album
Field Notes
Sugar, labor, memory
The museum work: holding the complicated story of Maui's plantation era with enough care that people can actually stay with it.
Jungle to Jungle
A sister-made record of wild places, animal intelligence, and the kind of curiosity that turns a trip into work.
Small, beautiful evidence
Flowers, paper, old photographs, handmade things, color on a table — the everyday archive that makes a life feel specific.
with Amanda Wilson · 2014
Jungle to Jungle
A sister-made adventure film: Borneo, Peru, Malaysia, Colombia. Wild places, animal intelligence, and the kind of curiosity that turns a trip into work.
"The way she loves — that's her greatest work of art."
— Pepper