Abigail Romanchak
Abigail Romanchak received a BFA and MFA in printmaking from the University of Hawaii, Manoa. She has held teaching positions at The Contemporary Museum, The Honolulu Museum of Art, Punahou School, The Maui Arts and Cultural Center and The Hui No’eau Visual Arts Center. In 2007 Abigail moved home to Maui to assist master printmaker, Paul Mullowney at Hui Press. Currently Abigail is producing new bodies of work for upcoming exhibitions.
Abigail has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally, as well as, throughout the state of Hawai’i. In the Fall of 2017, Abigail exhibited her work in a solo exhibit "Ground" with fellow printmaker, Charles Cohan at The Honolulu Museum of Art. Most recently, Abigail exhibited a new body of work with the Smithsonian Asia Pacific American Center for 'Ae Kai - A Culture Lab of Convergence.
Her work belongs to many public and private collections including, The White House, The Smithsonian, The Obama Presidential Library, The Australia National Museum, Hawaii State Art Museum, The Hawaii State Foundation on Culture and the Arts, Hanapi Foundation, John Hara Associates, Inc. Architects, The Nature Conservancy of Hawaii, Tori Richard, The Four Seasons, The Ritz Carlton and Nordstrom.
Abigail received the Ellen Craig Choy Award, as most outstanding artist, in the 2010 Biennial IX at The Contemporary Museum, Honolulu. In 2015, Abigail was awarded the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation fellowship. This fellowship made it possible for Abigail to produce a new body of work for a group exhibition, 'Aloha 'Aina' at The Lower Saxony State Museum, Hanover, Germany, Galerie Rash, Kassel, Germany, Linden Museum, Stuttgart, Germany. In 2016 Abigail was a Joan Mitchell Fellowship nominee.
Abigail sees her prints as a way to empower and assert a Hawaiian sense of identity and culture through art. She believes that native cultures are jeopardized once they stop speaking to people in the present. As an artist, she seeks to perpetuate Hawaiian culture not through traditional means, but contemporary ones, so that it may endure for generations to come. Abigail's work reveals an essential alignment between multiple systems of marking and is greatly influenced by the conceptual terrain of human imprint on the natural environment. Abigail is interested in exploring the boundaries between marking, claiming and making the unseen and overlooked ultimately visible.