TUTUVI NEWSPRINT
Tutuvi (Colleen Kimura)
2024


Loose Leaf
8 folded posters, with insert
11 x 15.5 inches (folded)
Edition of 250

Summary: Colleen Kimura got her start as a fashion designer in Hawaiʻi during the Hawaiian cultural resurgence of the 1970s. From 1972 to 1978 she ran Kimura’s—a studio, gallery, and venue. In 1980, shortly after returning home to Hawaiʻi from Fiji, where she was stationed for two years as a Peace Corps Volunteer, Colleen transformed Kimura’s into Tutuvi. Named after the Fijian word meaning “to wrap oneself up,” Tutuvi was a direct outcome of her experiences abroad, an eclectic mix of cultural practices and aesthetic concerns. 

In the late 1990s, Colleen and her studio assistant, Jason Teraoka, started creating works on paper together as a byproduct of Tutuvi garment production. Before screen printing designs on bolts of fabric, they would cover the ends of the studio table with pages from the daily newspapers to ensure that any overprinting could be easily cleaned up after the fact. As layers of high-contrast partial prints from different designs accumulated haphazardly on reused newsprint, Colleen and Jason saw an opportunity to transform remnants of their printing process into finished works of art.

Over 25 years later, in March 2024, a selection of these happy studio accidents was the focus of a modest exhibition, TUTUVI NEWSPRINT, at Arts & Letters Nuʻuanu. This loose leaf publication accompanies the framed works, as a way of disseminating and preserving the ephemeral quality of the original prints on newspaper. Each full sized poster is a full-scale replication of each print, offset printed on acid free paper. The insert, featuring text and a variety of Tutuvi hand-drawn logos, was printed in house at Tropic Editions Studio on a Risograph.

The zine is a co-published by Tropic Editions and Pu‘uhonua Society.