Spalding House, also known as the Cooke-Spalding House and called Nuumealani (heavenly terrace) by Anna Rice Cooke, who commissioned it, together with its gardens constitute a -acre former art museum in

Makiki Heights Makiki is an area of Honolulu, Hawaii, located northeast of downtown Honolulu, stretching east to west from Punahou Street to Pensacola Street and north to south from Round Top Drive/Makiki Heights Drive to Lunalilo Freeway. Punchbowl, an ext ...

Honolulu, Hawaii Honolulu (; ) is the capital and largest city of the U.S. state of Hawaii, which is in the Pacific Ocean. It is an unincorporated county seat of the consolidated City and County of Honolulu, situated along the southeast coast of the island ...

. Spalding House was built as a residence in 1925 by Mrs. Cooke, the widow of Charles Montague Cooke, a local businessman and missionary descendant. At the same time, the Honolulu Academy of Art (later renamed

Honolulu Museum of Art The Honolulu Museum of Art (formerly the Honolulu Academy of Arts) is an art museum in Honolulu, Hawaii. The museum is the largest of its kind in the state, and was founded in 1922 by Anna Rice Cooke. The museum has one of the largest single co ...

), which Mrs. Cooke endowed, was being built on the site of her former home on Beretania Street in Honolulu. The

home was designed by

Hart Wood Hart Wood (1880–1957) was an American architect who flourished during the "Golden Age" of Hawaiian architecture. He was one of the principal proponents of a distinctive "Hawaiian style" of architecture appropriate to the local environment and r ...

and later enlarged by the firm of Bertram Goodhue and Associates. In 1950, Cooke's daughter, Alice Spalding (Mrs. Phillip Spalding), engaged Vladimir Ossipoff to remodel the ground floor. The

acquired the estate as a bequest from Alice Spalding in 1968 and operated it as an annex for the display of Japanese prints from 1970 to 1978. In the late 1970s, it was sold to a subsidiary of ''

The Honolulu Advertiser ''The Honolulu Advertiser'' was a daily newspaper published in Honolulu, Hawaii. At the time publication ceased on June 6, 2010, it was the largest daily newspaper in the American state of Hawaii. It published daily with special Sunday and In ...

''. In 1986, the Thurston Twigg-Smith family converted it to

The Contemporary Museum The Honolulu Museum of Art Spalding House, formerly The Contemporary Museum, Honolulu, was integrated into the Honolulu Museum of Art under this name. It was the only museum in the state of Hawaii devoted exclusively to contemporary art. The Conte ...

. Following interior renovation, the museum, with its doors by artists Robert Graham and Tony Berlant, opened to the public in October 1988. On May 2, 2011, The Contemporary Museum, Honolulu ceased to exist as an independent entity, and is now known as the Honolulu Museum of Art Spalding House. The Honolulu Academy of Art acquired Spalding House along with its collections of more than 3,000 works of art. The

building, which has about 5,000 square feet of gallery space, reassumed its former name, “Spalding House." Around that time the Honolulu Academy of Art rebranded itself

The Milton Cades Pavilion

David Hockney David Hockney (born 9 July 1937) is an English painter, draftsman, printmaker, stage designer, and photographer. As an important contributor to the pop art movement of the 1960s, he is considered one of the most influential British artists o ...

designed stage sets for three one-act French operas presented at the

Metropolitan Opera The Metropolitan Opera (commonly known as the Met) is an American opera company based in New York City, resident at the Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center, currently situated on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The company is opera ...

in 1981. He reconstructed these stage sets for a 1983 exhibition at the

Walker Art Center The Walker Art Center is a multidisciplinary contemporary art center in the Lowry Hill neighborhood of Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States. The Walker is one of the most-visited modern and contemporary art museums in the United States and, to ...

, ''Hockney Paints the Stage''. The three-dimensional set for Maurice Ravel's opera, '' L'enfant et les sortilèges'' (''The Child and the Spells''), was acquired for the 1988 opening of The Contemporary Museum, Honolulu, and was installed in the Milton Cades Pavilion on the grounds of Spalding House.

Gardens

The surrounding gardens were originally landscaped between 1928 and 1941 as a Japanese stroll garden by Reverend K. H. Inagaki, a Christian minister of Japanese ancestry. In 1941, he traveled to Japan to visit relatives, and was never heard from again. From 1979 to 1980, the gardens were resuscitated by Honolulu landscape architect James C. Hubbard. During the 1990s, Kahaluu-based landscape architect Leland Miyano brought the gardens to their current state. While open as a museum, the grounds displayed sculpture by Satoru Abe, Charles Arnoldi, John Buck,

Mark Bulwinkle Mark Bulwinkle (born 1946, Waltham, Massachusetts) is an American graphic artist and sculptor who works in cut steel. He received a BFA from the University of Pittsburgh in 1968 and an MFA in printmaking from the San Francisco Art Institute in 19 ...

Deborah Butterfield Deborah Kay Butterfield (born May 7, 1949) is an American sculptor. Along with her artist-husband John Buck, she divides her time between a farm in Bozeman, Montana, and studio space in Hawaii. She is known for her sculptures of horses made fr ...

, Gordon Chandler, Jedd Garet, Jun Kaneko,

George Rickey George Warren Rickey (June 6, 1907 – July 17, 2002) was an American kinetic sculptor. Early life and education Rickey was born on June 6, 1907, in South Bend, Indiana. When Rickey was still a child, his father, an executive with Singer S ...

James Seawright James Seawright (1936-2022) was an American modernist sculptor. Seawright was born in Jackson, Mississippi, and grew up in Greenwood, Mississippi. As a boy, he discovered machine tools at a friend’s house, which launched his lifelong love of ...

Toshiko Takaezu Toshiko Takaezu (June 17, 1922 – March 9, 2011) was an American ceramic artist, painter, sculptor, and educator who was known for her rounded, closed forms that viewed ceramics as a fine art and more than a functional vessel. She is of Japane ...

Tom Wesselmann Thomas K. Wesselmann (February 23, 1931 – December 17, 2004) was an American artist associated with the Pop Art movement who worked in painting, collage and sculpture. Early years Wesselmann was born in Cincinnati. From 1949 to 1951 he atte ...

, and Arnold Zimmerman.

Closure

The Honolulu Museum of Art announced in July 2019 that it would close its Spalding House location and put the property on the market. The site closed to the public in December 2019.

References

External links

Spalding House
– Honolulu Museum of Art
National Register of Historic Places Registration Form
{{authority control Hawaiian architecture National Register of Historic Places in Honolulu 1925 establishments in Hawaii Houses completed in 1925